Chronicles of Eating Disorders from Physician’s Notes to Netflix Series: Representations of Eating Disorders in Popular Media

Abstract

The earliest medical descriptions of anorexia occurred in 1689 with Richard Morton's Phthisiologia, Or, A Treatise of Consumptions, however, it took another century for medical science to accept anorexia nervosa as a medical condition. Later on, it was Hilde Bruch who initiated the first public discussion on anorexia in the latter half of the twentieth century. While the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resorted solely to the verbal medium to narrate their eating disorder experience, the post-millennial era turned to a variety of visual and verbovisual media. Stylistically differing widely from verbal texts, graphic medicine, a subgenre of comics, provides singular ways of negotiating eating disorders. Accordingly, a concise overview of some of the canonical works on eating disorders from 1970–2018 will be presented. Lastly, graphic medicine and the aptness of the comics medium in representing the subtle layers of eating disorder experience will be examined.