On March 11, 1904 Hilde Bruch, a pioneering researcher in eating disorders, was born in the town of Dülken, Germany. Hilde was educated in a small Jewish elementary school and an all girls high school before attending college and receiving a doctorate in medicine from the University of Freiburg in 1929.
Earning a medical degree, as a woman, in the 1920s was an extraordinary feat. At that time, despite the heroic efforts of the feminist movement, women still faced discrimination and remained underrepresented in the field of medicine.
In 1933, Hilde and her family left Germany, due to the rise in antisemitism. They came to London, where she worked for a year at the East End Maternity Hospital and the Child Guidance Clinic, before departing to the America.
From 1941 to 1943, Hilde studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, a private research university, in Baltimore, Maryland. She underwent psychoanalytic training, studying with several notable psychiatrists, which would later inform her understanding of eating disorders.
In America, Hilde still faced discrimination for being a woman. Most women physicians were placed in public health institutions and discouraged, by their male counterparts in the field, from opening their own private practices.
As scholar Rachel Markell Morantz-Sanchez illustrates in her book ‘Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine‘: “Generations of women physicians who came of age after 1930 were trained in a medical world almost totally bereft of female-run institutions, female support systems, or a traditionally female point of view.”
However, Hilde displayed her fierce independence by opening her own private practice in New York.
She published numerous scholarly studies on obesity, schizophrenia, and psychotherapeutic training. Increasingly, her research focused on the underlying causes of anorexia nervosa.
In 1973 she published her seminal work ‘Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within.’
Hilde’s study into the cause of anorexia nervosa created a new shift in the physician-patient dynamic. She defended anorexics instead of belittling them, recognising anorexia nervosa as a mental illness which stemmed from ‘self-development’. Hilde’s new approach in the treatment of anorexics, rooted in psychology and therapy treatments rather than medicine, was revolutionary.
Much of Hilde’s work is still important and informs many current treatments and therapies for people suffering from eating disorders today.
She died on December 15, 1984 aged 80.
“When you are so unhappy you don’t know how to accomplish anything, then to have control over your body becomes an extreme accomplishment. You make of your body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator.”
– Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa
Sources