Sarah Jacob was the Carmarthenshire farm girl who dominated the
national and regional press for almost all of 1869. In the popular
imagination she was 'the Welsh fasting girl' and although she was
not the first anorexic, she was arguably the first to cause a
national furore, and become something of a celebrity. She died
despite a team of nurses from Guy's Hospital stationed at her home
in Lletherneuadd, and after the best minds in British medicine had
set theorised about the cause of her apparently supernatural
existence - living in spite of starvation, losing no weight yet
clearly suffering in all kinds of ways. Sarah's was not the only
story here. Her parents were charged with murder and eventually
convicted of manslaughter. The Girl Who Lived on Air retells this
human story of an anorexic made to be the centre of a lucrative and
also media-hungry 'spin' on the nineteenth century nexus of
knowledge between science and superstition, folk-belief and
religious asceticism. Stephen Wade covers new ground in examining
the medical issues surrounding the case, the legal complexities
(including the use of Welsh in court) and the interpretation on a
newly enacted law which reformulated serious crime, the prison life
of Sarah's parents, and the significance of folklore and
superstition in an unusual and yet all too familiar story.
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