Unlocking the Golden Cage: An Intimate Biography of Hilde Bruch, M.D.

This biography of Hilde Bruch is a colorful, personal account of a legendary figure in modern psychiatry. Although she is best known as a pioneer in the field of eating disorders and is considered a major contributor to the conceptualization of anorexia nervosa, those accomplishments came in her "golden years" after an already prodigious career. Bruch authored more than 250 articles and six books, including The Golden Cage, a bestseller that introduced anorexia nervosa into popular culture. In the 60's, when thinness became a national obsession, she became widely-known and quoted, and she remained the world's foremost authority on eating disorders well into her eighties. Hilde's story begins in a turn-of-the-century German hamlet, where she stood out as an exceptionally intelligent and intuitive child, who watched skeptically as Kaiser Wilhelm's troops grandly marched off to World War I. Later, as a young Jewish physician, she experienced and fled the prejudice of the Third Reich to E