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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78.2 (2004) 491-492



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Michelle Stacey. The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery. New York: Putnam, 2002. 336 pp. Ill. $U.S. 23.95; $Can. 34.99 (1-58542-135-9).

My mother was born in a brownstone on Gates Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, down the street from the house in which Mollie Fancher (the celebrated "fasting girl") had died just a few years earlier. But the story of Miss Fancher, who lived in that house for fifty years without leaving—and for much of that time, it was alleged, without eating—belongs to an entirely different era. Drawing heavily on contemporary newspapers and on Abram Dailey's 1894 biography of Mollie Fancher, Michelle Stacey's lively account of Mollie's bedridden life conveys the social and cultural atmosphere of Gilded Age New York. Even her narrative idiom is that of the nineteenth-century sources, which she has examined thoroughly.

Following a streetcar accident in 1865, eighteen-year-old Mollie—a previously unremarkable young woman—took to her bed with a variety of complaints that could be described as neurological, hysterical, anorectic, psychogenic, or "all of the above." She entered a nine-year "trance" (of which she later claimed no memory), and by 1878 she had attained celebrity for existing, apparently indefinitely, without food. Her case became a flash-point for the competing ideologies of the day. To scientifically inclined physicians and others in New York—the new intellectual capital of a rapidly modernizing country—Mollie's condition posed no mystery, although perhaps a diagnostic challenge: her claim to prolonged fasting was either a delusion or a fraud. To the burgeoning spiritualist movement, however, Mollie was a poster child for the triumph of spirit over matter.

Michelle Stacey explores this fascinating story as a journalist with a special interest in American attitudes toward food. If she seems friendlier to the spiritualists than to the scientists, her real sympathies are with psychologists, who had barely put in an appearance during Mollie's lifetime. Her perspective is frankly not that of a historian. "It is clear," she writes, "that the solution to the mysteries of Mollie Fancher's existence will never be found in the past. . . . The only way to get at Mollie's secrets now . . . is to drag her into the present" (p. 279). The denouement of the mystery is primarily an exercise in retrospective psychiatric diagnosis.

From the standpoint of a historian, Stacey's use of secondary sources is somewhat troubling. In the chapter devoted to the neurologist William Hammond, M.D., for example, while the endnotes correctly indicate the author's heavy use of works by myself and Dr. Jack Key, the casual reader is unlikely to realize that pages-long sections are actually close paraphrases. Moreover, Stacey inexplicably neglects to use readily available information to illuminate her topic. For example, Hammond's professional interest in Mollie was certainly motivated by his concurrent interests in legitimating neurology and debunking spiritualism. However, Stacey entirely overlooks the fact that Hammond's scientific reputation (and self-image) had been established thirty years earlier on the basis of his laboratory research on the physiology of digestion. Thus, popular challenges to his authority in the Fancher case—the implicit ones no less than the direct— [End Page 491] threatened not only the respectability of neurology, but that of science more broadly considered.

Stacey treats other secondary sources similarly. She mines important works such as Joan Jacob Brumberg's Fasting Girls for nuggets of information, but rarely engages their arguments. Her account pieces together her sources, rather than synthesizing or rebutting them. Her main theme is not, after all, the conflicting tendencies in nineteenth-century intellectual life that drive the plot of her story, nor is it the ways in which nineteenth-century women dealt with conflicting forces within their own lives, exemplified (as Stacey does take note) in Mollie's case. Rather, the Fancher case serves to contrast that era with the "age of neurosis," which was dawning during the last...

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