Eating Disorders Span Centuries

Modern media reports to the contrary, obesity and eating disorders aren't unique to the latter part of the 20th century.

A new study suggests the famed 19th-century poet George Gordon Lord Byron was one such sufferer. He reportedly ballooned to more than 200 pounds at the age of 18 -- then became anorexic and bulimic.

Writing in in the British Medical Journal, Dr. Jeremy Hugh Bacon of London's Imperial College School of Medicine says Byron treated himself with excessive dieting, binging, laxatives and obsessive exercise. His weight often plunged dramatically, to 137 pounds at one point.

Byron once commented on his condition that "I am grown very thin. It is the fact, so much so, that people think I am going... My ribs display skin of no great thickness and my clothes have been taken in by nearly half a yard."

Baron says Lord Byron took to eating alone almost always and that psychiatrists suspect he gorged in secret. Arthur Crisp, a professor of psychological medicine, believes the poet was not simply afraid of obesity, but was terrified of gaining any weight at all.