Tribute to Lasègue

To the Editor: A well-deserved tribute was paid to the French psychiatrist Charles Lasègue by Henri Chabrol, M.D., Ph.D., and Jacques Corraze, M.D., Ph.D. (1). The French authors, however, were not overly chauvinistic. They forgot to mention Lasègue’s pioneering work in forensic psychiatry, including his seminal papers on exhibitionism and kleptomania. Moreover, they erroneously dated his beautiful psychological description of anorexia nervosa as “5 years after Gull’s” (p. 28). As van Deth and I discussed elsewhere (2), Gull’s so-called discovery of “hysterical apepsia” in 1868 was his own reinterpretation of a cryptic reference to the disorder that had been made to support his claim for priority in describing the new illness. A careful analysis of the original sources clearly shows that “the modern history of anorexia nervosa commences in 1973 with the independent ‘parenthood’ shared by Sir William Withey Gull and Dr. Ernest Charles Lasègue” (3, p. 161).