Fleury Imbert

French physiologist and phrenologist Fleury Imbert published a book on diseases in women; it initiated medical theories about eating disorders.

French physician Pierre Briquet (1796-1881) published Traité clinique et thérapeutique de l'hystérie. Briquet argued that hysteria was caused by the central nervous system rather than a disorder of the uterus, as was commonly believed...

American physician William Stout Chipley offered the first description of sitomania, a phase of insanity characterized by an intense dread of food; the symptoms resembled what was later called anorexia nervosa.

At the annual meeting of the Clinical Society of London , physician Sir William Withey Gull applied his newly-coined label anorexia nervosa as the term for a female nervous disorder. That same year a French...