A statement of facts, relative to the supposed abstinence of Ann Moore, of Tutbury, Staffordshire: and a narrative of the circumstances which led to the recent detection of the imposture: to which is subjoined an appendix, containing medical and other papers, illustrative of the statement / compiled and published at the request of the committee, formed for the investigation of the case.

  • Legh Richmond
Date:
1813
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A statement of facts, relative to the supposed abstinence of Ann Moore, of Tutbury, Staffordshire: and a narrative of the circumstances which led to the recent detection of the imposture: to which is subjoined an appendix, containing medical and other papers, illustrative of the statement / compiled and published at the request of the committee, formed for the investigation of the case. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Cirors gives the history of a girl at Confoulens in Poitou, who lived three years without food. : Abstin. Confolentan. Arbertus Maenus says, hesaw a woman at Cologne, who often lived twenty, and sometimes thirty days without food $ and that he saw a hy pochondriacal man, who lived without food for seven weeks, drinking only a bape ht of water every other day. De Animalibus. lib. vir. Hi_panus relates the case of a gir] who lived many years with- out food or drink. This subject he says, had the abdomen wasted and retracted towards the spine, but without any hardness. She did not void any urine or feces by the bowels. Cent. V. Obs. Chirurg. 33. ‘SyLvius, says, there was a young woman in Spain, aged twenty- two years, who never ate any food, but lived entirely on water. And that there was a girl in Narbonne, and another in Germany, who lived three years in good health, without any kind of food or drink. Consil. Adver. Famem,. It is said that Democritus lived to the age of 109 years, and that in the latter part of his life, he subsisted ‘almost entir ely, for forty-days at one time, (according to seme writers,) on smelling: honey and hot bread. Crocodiles, bears, toads, dormice, snails, alpine rats, and swal- lows, and various animals in caverns, dungeons, rocks, and moun- tains, where no food can be had, lived without eating or drinking for a great length of time, as every philosopher knows.—But here is asubject untouched by physiologists or physicians, ancient, or mo- _ dern. It demands particular reflection, that all the remarkable in- stances of long existence without food, should be among the female sex, and generally in the young. part of that sex. This, as far as relates to extreme cases, is repugnant to the axiom of the divine Hippocrates, who says, that old people bear fasting better than the young. Sect. I. Aphor. 13. _ It isalso an exception operating against the universally received opinion, that the gastric Juice, in young people, is most potent in exciting the stomach to hunger. I have collected the few preceding cases to illustrate the sub- ject, and for the purpose before mentioned, More of the same kind may be found in other medical writers.”