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It turns out that the West may indeed be culpable for the rise in eating disorders in Asia, but not for the obvious reasons.
Anorexia was rare in the mid-nineteenth century not because physicians somehow failed to notice their starving patients, Shorter believes, but because it hadn’t yet been widely acknowledged as part of the symptom pool of that time. Only after it became a culturally agreed-upon expression of internal distress did it become widespread.
Fear of fatness wasn’t recognized in the Hong Kong culture as a legitimate reason for self-starvation; it was therefore unavailable to the patient both as a private belief and as an explanation she might give her doctor.
