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.