In the mid to late 1860s in Britain, food, eating habits and problems related to the female body all became hot topics. Young women workers in Lancashire starved as a result of the crisis in the cotton supplies during and after the American Civil War; and the royal doctor Sir William Gull was engaged in studying and describing what we know now as anorexia. It was also an age of a new, revisionary attitudes (from some quarters at least) resulting from the great discoveries of Darwin relating to evolution.