"The Fasting Girl" by Michelle Stacey

Victorian America's foremost anorexic became hugely famous for surviving for 12 years on a few spoonfuls of milk and a banana.

By Kate Bolick

May 1, 2002 | Every so often in the history of mental health a disease rears up, wreaks havoc and then disappears altogether, only rarely to afflict anyone again. Specific to a certain place and time, these flash-in-the-pan illnesses are by definition unique, and always deeply unusual. Indeed, from the whirlwind suicide trend among teenage boys in Micronesia, to a propensity for self-cutting among American girls, they are diseases that seem sprung from the tabloids.

The "mad travelers" are a classic example. In 1886, young French men began falling into fugue states and roaming the countryside for months on end, until -- like so many peripatetic Rip Van Winkles -- they finally returned to consciousness thousands of miles from home, having no idea how they'd arrived there. Not long after the century turned, the phenomenon had disappeared. How to explain it? Was it a verifiable illness? Or some bizarre and deeply unconscious fad?

Around the same time, and on a much grander scale, Victorian women on both sides of the Atlantic were suffering from hysteria -- in epidemic proportions. Hysterics suffered from a litany of symptoms, starting with paleness and weight loss, and devolving into strange pains, fits, spasms, trances, partial paralysis and sensory deprivation. Conveniently, hysterics tended to be almost exclusively middle- to upper-class women who could spring for the standard treatment -- continual confinement, sometimes lasting an entire lifetime. "The Fasting Girl" is journalist Michelle Stacey's portrait of one of these women, Mollie Fancher -- the posthumously anointed poster girl, if you will, of the Victorian era's most popular malady.

Actually, that's not quite right. Mollie was a regular cause célèbre back in her day, known alternately as the Brooklyn Enigma or the Brooklyn Fasting Girl. But when her once widespread ailment went the way of the hoop skirt, her story was lost to the annals of medical history and tabloid news. Which, it turns out, was a lucky stroke. Stacey's lively, thorough and nuanced examination of the medical and social ramifications of Mollie's unusual -- yet emblematic -- medical condition couldn't have been written without a century's worth of hindsight.

Mollie's story went like this: In 1864, the once bright and spirited 17-year-old was pulled from Brooklyn's reputable all-girls school, Brooklyn Heights Seminary, and diagnosed with dyspepsia -- "a kind of glorified indigestion" that many girls her age seemed to be suffering from. When a "rest cure" didn't do the trick, her doctor recommended, fatefully, that she get some exercise. She did, and in 1865 was thrown from a horse, striking her head on the cobblestones and breaking two ribs. Over the next few months she convalesced, accepted a young man's marriage proposal and then, just as everything was looking up, fell out of a horse-drawn streetcar and was dragged behind it for nearly a block until she lost consciousness. Her friends carried her battered body back to her house. The date was June 8, 1865. She never left home again.

For the first year of her confinement, Mollie -- suffering from mysterious swellings, hemorrhagings and coughing fits -- was subjected to a battery of arcane treatments. Among other things, "The Fasting Girl" is a veritable catalog of Victorian ailments and remedies: alcohol rubs; "blisterings"; electric shocks from a battery; alignment with the earth's electromagnetic currents; "hydrotherapy" in the form of sitz baths, dry alcohol steam baths and "dousings"; an ice jacket; beef tea baths; and enemas of beef tea, brandy and "milk punch." None of them did any good.

At the end of that grueling year, Mollie fell into a trance (an elaborate escape, perhaps, from her physician's ineptitude?) that lasted for nine years. But she was hardly comatose. Indeed, she was a regular Martha Stewart. While in her altered state she "wrote more than six thousand five hundred letters, worked up one hundred thousand ounces of worsted, did a vast amount of fine embroidery, and constructed a great number of decorative wax-work flowers and leaves." Meanwhile, she started communing with the dead, having out-of-body experiences, "seeing" with her forehead and her fingertips rather than with her eyes and channeling five "other Mollies" -- named Sunbeam, Idol, Rosebud, Pearl and Ruby. But Mollie's real claim to fame was her astonishingly meager diet. To the end, Mollie and her caretakers maintained that for 12 years she ate nothing more than four teaspoons of milk, two teaspoons of wine, one small banana and one cracker. The very picture of Victorian refinement, she "lived on air."

Next Page: What did Mollie really eat?

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