DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.70301#0373
LIFE OF ANN MOORE, THE FASTING WOMAN. 339
fatiguing and even painful. In the course of conversation,
that gentleman intimated the expediency of a repetition of
the watching, when she so completely forgot her situation
that she raised herself upright in bed, a position, in which,
as he was previously informed, she had not been for more
than a year, clenched her fists, moved her arms and head
about with as much force and ease as the most healthy
woman, of an equal age, could possibly do, and talked at
the same time most loudly and incessantly from the effect of
violent passion.
From these contradictions, observed by himself and
others, from the physical impossibilities of the case, and
from various moral considerations, Dr. Henderson main-
tained, in a pamphlet published in March 1813, that there
was every reason to consider the abstinence of Ann Moore
as feigned, and to denounce her as an artful impostor. That
she might be partially diseased and subsist on small quanti-
ties of food, he did not attempt to deny; but that she
actually did eat, drink, and sleep must, he contended, be
apparent to every person of common discernment who wit-
nessed her condition.
These sentiments were shared by many whose minds were
not blinded by superstition and fanaticism, and who had not
made a sacrifice of reason to credulity. The dread of expe-
riments manifested on various occasions by Ann Moore,
and her declaration that she would never submit to a second
watching strengthened the doubts and suspicions of the
sceptical. She once refused to allow Dr. Darwin to hold a
mirror before her face, in order to examine her respiration,
exclaiming, “No more experiments for me! I have suffered
enough already from experiments.” At another time she
contrived to break a thermometer which a gentleman had
put into her hand, to ascertain the heat of her body. When
Mr. Thompson, who has been already mentioned, proposed
a second watching, she said, that she had once been upon
x x 2
fatiguing and even painful. In the course of conversation,
that gentleman intimated the expediency of a repetition of
the watching, when she so completely forgot her situation
that she raised herself upright in bed, a position, in which,
as he was previously informed, she had not been for more
than a year, clenched her fists, moved her arms and head
about with as much force and ease as the most healthy
woman, of an equal age, could possibly do, and talked at
the same time most loudly and incessantly from the effect of
violent passion.
From these contradictions, observed by himself and
others, from the physical impossibilities of the case, and
from various moral considerations, Dr. Henderson main-
tained, in a pamphlet published in March 1813, that there
was every reason to consider the abstinence of Ann Moore
as feigned, and to denounce her as an artful impostor. That
she might be partially diseased and subsist on small quanti-
ties of food, he did not attempt to deny; but that she
actually did eat, drink, and sleep must, he contended, be
apparent to every person of common discernment who wit-
nessed her condition.
These sentiments were shared by many whose minds were
not blinded by superstition and fanaticism, and who had not
made a sacrifice of reason to credulity. The dread of expe-
riments manifested on various occasions by Ann Moore,
and her declaration that she would never submit to a second
watching strengthened the doubts and suspicions of the
sceptical. She once refused to allow Dr. Darwin to hold a
mirror before her face, in order to examine her respiration,
exclaiming, “No more experiments for me! I have suffered
enough already from experiments.” At another time she
contrived to break a thermometer which a gentleman had
put into her hand, to ascertain the heat of her body. When
Mr. Thompson, who has been already mentioned, proposed
a second watching, she said, that she had once been upon
x x 2