Anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa enters the account through the later illnesses of Dolours Price and Marian Price, whose eating disorders became serious enough to affect their imprisonment and release. The narrative places these illnesses in the wake of the sisters’ hunger strikes, but the two conditions are not interchangeable: the strike was a declared political action, while the later disorder is described as a grave medical condition with lasting consequences.

Political Hunger Strike and Illness

At Brixton Prison, shortly after their conviction at Winchester Castle, Dolours and Marian Price refused food as part of a campaign to be transferred to Northern Ireland to serve their sentences as political prisoners. They intended to continue the strike even at the risk of death. When Dolours had gone more than two weeks without eating, prison staff restrained her and force-fed her through a tube; she vomited the mixture soon afterward. This episode establishes the bodily extremity of the protest, but it does not by itself explain the sisters’ later eating disorders or establish that the disorder was simply a continuation of the strike.

That distinction matters to the account’s chronology. The hunger strike is presented as a chosen form of political resistance, whereas the later illness is recorded as anorexia or a severe eating disorder and becomes a matter of medical treatment and release. The available account does not supply a clinical history, explain the onset in diagnostic terms, or reduce the later condition to a single cause.

Dolours Price

After returning to Northern Ireland and serving time in Armagh jail, Dolours Price drew back from the republican movement and embraced nonviolence. She also suffered an eating disorder identified in the book’s account of her life as anorexia. Her declining health brought her to Musgrave Park Hospital, and she was released from prison on medical grounds in April 1981. The illness thus altered the course of her imprisonment: release came not as a political settlement of her sentence but because her condition had become severe.

Her subsequent life included continued political attachment to republicanism, but also periods of distress and treatment. The account later records post-traumatic stress, depression, and alcohol and drug addiction; those are distinct problems and should not be treated as synonyms or as proof of a single explanation for her anorexia. What the evidence makes clear is that the eating disorder formed part of a longer history of serious ill health, rather than ending with her release.

Marian Price and the Sisters’ Different Outcomes

Marian Price also developed a severe eating disorder. The account links its seriousness to her release from prison, while placing her earlier imprisonment alongside her sister’s: both had taken part in the Brixton hunger strike and were later held in Armagh jail. The evidence does not provide the same detailed medical chronology for Marian as it does for Dolours, so the circumstances and course of her illness cannot be specified further.

The sisters’ shared history of refusing food in prison therefore leads to distinct later records of illness and release. For Dolours, the account identifies hospitalization and an April 1981 release on medical grounds; for Marian, it records release because of a severe eating disorder. Their cases show how bodily vulnerability remained consequential beyond the period of overt protest, while leaving the precise relationship between the hunger strike and the later illnesses unresolved.