Lollipop Death

Recuperating from an appendectomy at the age of 19, Linnea Fransson of East Orange, N. J. was told by the doctor to eat what she liked. What she liked was candy, lemonade, ginger ale. She ate nothing else. She left business school, retreated to her home, sucked lollipops to her heart's content. When she began suffering from starvation, doctors at Orange Memorial Hospital tried in vain to give Linnea tube feedings and intravenous injections. For a while they persuaded her to eat an apple a day, and half a teaspoonful of raw, grated vegetables. But anything besides her candystore diet made her sick at her stomach. After ten years of living on sweets she weighed 66 lbs.

Last week Linnea stitched up two dresses for her sisters, sucked her last lollipop, quietly lay down and died. "Chronic malnutrition killed her," said Dr. George Potts Olcott Jr., Assistant Essex County Medical Examiner. "The autopsy performed showed no reason for starvation. Her condition was perfect but she just wouldn't eat."

To psychiatrists, Linnea's case was no puzzle. Anorexia nervosa (hysterical lack of appetite) often occurs in unstable women who are unconsciously afraid to grow up, and, according to Freudians, derive a childish sexual pleasure from finicky eating (oral eroticism). Some, like Linnea, gorge themselves on childish foods, others retreat all the way back to the suckling stage, stubbornly take nothing but milk. From such disastrous whims, say doctors, few recover.

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