Manisha Saraf

About the author: At the time that she wrote the following essay, Manisha Saraf was in the class of 1999 at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. This essay was an entry in the Alpha Omega Alpha 1998 Student Essay Competition.

Holy anorexia was a term used until the sixteenth or seventeenth century to describe the act of self-starvation in an attempt to reach a higher plane of spirituality and closeness to God. While there is no physical distinction between holy anorexia and modern-day anorexia nervosa, there has been a change in how society interprets, judges, and reacts to the behavior of self-starvation. Holy anorexia was respected by medieval society and considered to be a method a woman used to cleanse her spirit. There were no attempts to stop the behavior and it was...