Fasting girl

The ability to survive without nourishment was attributed to some saints during the Middle Ages, including Catherine of Siena and Lidwina of Schiedam, and regarded as a miracle and a sign of sanctity.

Doctors and people in the public began to question her abilities and wished to perform tests to determine the truthfulness of her claims.

[5][6] A case that led to a death and arrests was that of Sarah Jacob (May 12, 1857 – December 17, 1869), the "Welsh fasting girl", who claimed not to have eaten any food at all after the age of ten.

[7] A local vicar, initially skeptical, became convinced that the case was authentic and Jacob enjoyed a long period of publicity, during which she received numerous gifts and donations from people who believed she was miraculous.

Jacob died of starvation a few days later and it was found that she had actually been consuming very little amounts of food secretly, which she could no longer do under medical supervision.

The evidence was circumstantial: "At the hotel I searched her clothing and found in one of her pockets a doughnut with a bite taken out of it.... On Fast day I had a lunch served to me...

Because fasting girls were such a curiosity in the Victorian era, many companies and individuals rushed to put them on display, as in a then-popular freak show or human zoo.

In the case of Josephine Marie Bedard, two different Boston-based enterprises, the Nickelodeon and Stone and Shaw's museum, competed in court for the right to "exhibit the girl" publicly.