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Outlook: How Dickens Helped Me Survive Anorexia

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Laura Freeman

26/02/2018 GMT

How Dickens Helped Me Survive Anorexia

BBC World Service - Outlook, How Dickens Helped Me Survive Anorexia

Through novels Laura Freeman was able to eat again after a decade of battling anorexia

Laura Freeman's anorexia meant she became so thin that she was developing brittle bone disease. It was through novels, she says, that she started getting interested in food again.

From the age of 12, English schoolgirl Laura Freeman found it hard to eat. She was diagnosed with anorexia, and became so thin that she was developing brittle bone disease. For ten years, the only thing she had an appetite for was literature as she was a voracious reader. It was through novels, she says, that she became interested in food again. These novels included those of the great 19th century English writer, Charles Dickens. Laura Freeman has written her own book called The Reading Cure.

In Culpeper, Virginia there's one of the largest film archives in the world. During the Cold War, billions of dollars in cash were stashed there in case conflict broke out. But these days it houses a nitrate film vault, which is owned by the US Library of Congress. It's looked after by a full-on film enthusiast called George Willeman.

Professor Corneille Ewango has done wonderful work protecting one of the largest rainforests in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ituri forest. But when he was a boy his attitude to nature and wildlife was very different: he poached elephants to raise money to go to university.

(Picture: Laura Freeman. Courtesy of Laura Freeman.)

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