The Hunger Artist - The Fasting Girl

Excerpted from
The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery
By Michelle Stacey

In 1880, the curtain was about to rise on the age of neurosis. In that year, a new book titled Neurasthenia defined a condition of general malaise, attributed to the stresses of modern life, and laid the groundwork for our current understanding of common psychological maladies like anxiety and depression. At the same time, at Harvard, William James (a neurasthenic himself) had started writing his seminal Principles of Psychology - a task that would take more than a decade. In Vienna, Freud was completing his course of study at the university, which would award him an M.D. degree the following year. And in New York, in the dog days of August, an eccentric little man named Henry S. Tanner was writing a footnote to that incipient history of neurosis by making a spectacle of himself. The oddest aspect of his contribution was that it appeared at first glance to be not about the mind at all, but about the body and its mortal limits.

At seven-twenty a.m. on August 5, Dr. Tanner awoke from a fitful sleep and called for a glass of water-although he knew from experience what the result would be. After eagerly swallowing three ounces, approximately the amount in two shot glasses. Tanner was seized with a paroxysm of vomiting. Water alone was keeping him alive, but it was also, paradoxically, making him unbearably sick. He shortly thereafter fell back into light sleep, and slept until nine twenty-five a.m.

The details of one middle-aged man's digestive difficulties would normally have gone unremarked by anyone other than concerned family members, especially in the late Victorian era, when "dyspepsia"- an umbrella term for all manner of stomach troubles-was considered the inevitable wage of modern man's frenetic and mechanized lifestyle. But instead, a precise roster of Dr. Tanner's agonies appeared on the front page of the next day's New York Times, and included not only every episode of vomiting that followed, but every moment of nausea or reverie, and every mustard sponge-bath or alcohol-vapor bath administered in the hopes of relieving his symptoms. Many such details had appeared on or near the front page of the Times for several weeks already, with the narrative becoming daily more urgent.

The reason for this unusually personal and detailed coverage was itself quite out of the ordinary: Tanner, a temperance-boosting, unorthodox physician from Minneapolis, had undertaken to demonstrate for New York-and indeed for the entire country-the excruciating effects of starvation on a human being. August 5 was the thirty-eighth day that he had existed on nothing but water, and his body was exhibiting the extreme effects of such deprivation. He was listless and feeble, and like a newborn baby craved a nap every few hours, during which he lay in a huddled heap with knees drawn up. His stomach rejected almost every swallow of water, and when he vomited he ejected fragments of decomposed mucous membrane.

Not many people would freely choose to visit such ghastliness upon themselves. Tanner had ostensibly offered up his body in the name of science-but he displayed, as well, a strong sense of thoroughly modern media savvy. He did not squirrel himself away in a dim and private laboratory for the duration of his attempt to live forty days without food (an interestingly biblical length of time). Instead, Tanner rented Clarendon Hall, on East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan, a public meeting place, and sat down to his task in full view of visiting newspaper-men, medical men, and hordes of average citizens eager to see a medically sanctioned sideshow. From the first days, his public display attracted the curious, who shelled out twenty-five cents (fifty in the later, even more dramatic, days of the fast) to view the suffering Tanner. Six days into the fast, the newspapers were already speculating on two key questions: Would he die? Would he go insane and become a raving lunatic? By the end of the first week, Tanner found the crowds overwhelming. When a Friday-night group of rowdy, cigar-chomping spectators pushed into the hall, perfuming the fetid, malarial July air with their bodily scents, Tanner was disgusted and sickened. His medical watchers imposed a new rule: Only reporters and physicians would be permitted into Tanner's inner sanctum.

But, as one reporter remarked, "the public, invited at first to visit him, now refuse[d] to keep away," and Tanner was by nature garrulous. His suffering made him restless, and he often couldn't resist strolling the hall, his attendants alongside, and indulging in lively discussions with members of his constantly changing audience. By the end of July, as he approached a full month without food, ticket totals were nearing $1,000 a day, and the ladies in particular were fascinated and full of sympathy for his agony. Various female admirers brought the short and (formerly) stout fifty-four-year-old physician bouquets of flowers and offered to serenade him with songs. Public figures-politicians, generals, famous physicians-paid their respects.

Dr. Tanner's remarkable fortitude may have been driven equally by scientific curiosity and a lust for publicity, but he claimed that its deepest motive was altruism. He said he wanted to support by his self-starvation the reputation of a woman who had lately become famed, whether willingly or not, for her own self-starvation. That woman, a bedridden, soft-spoken wraith named Mollie Fancher, had a year and a half before been the subject of sustained media attention that made Tanner's daily coverage look modest by comparison. It was the presence of Fancher, variously called the Brooklyn Enigma or the Brooklyn Fasting Girl-also variously called a miracle or a fraud-that shifted Tanner's experiment in starvation from the realm of the body to the realm of the mind, or the spirit. As he neared the end of his fast, a minister at Manhattan's Seventh Street Methodist Episcopal Church spoke of Tanner's efforts, and of his own profound regret "that so many members of the medical profession paid attention only to muscle and bone, and failed to recognize the existence of the invisible, spiritual, and eternal.. .. The forces in man are not wholly material.. . . We have a power in us that we don't understand."

Mollie Fancher claimed to be in touch with those forces and powers, and part of her claim rested on this: that, she said, she had lived without food, not for forty days like Tanner, but for twelve years (give or take the very occasional nibble of fruit or cracker). The fact that some highly respected citizens actually believed her was the impetus both for a fracas that encompassed many of the ambient late-Victorian ideas about mind and soul, faith and science, and for a fame that would virtually eclipse its human subject. Fancher was, in fact, one of those most intriguing of historical figures: one whose prominence is powerful but brief, and whose legacy lies not in what she herself accomplished but in what she ignited. This woman, whose name is unfamiliar today, who spent fifty years confined to her bed in the same unchanging bedchamber-while the Brooklyn streets around her home metamorphosed from unpaved paths to twentieth-century electric-lit cobbled avenues-became a lightning rod for some of the largest intellectual storms of the time. Food, its intake or its avoidance, was only the beginning.