Daughter of Saint Paula and a disciple of Saint Jerome. A member of a prominent Senatorial family in Rome, she was a young widow and had a spiritual conversion after a severe fever, dying four months later in 384 after age 20, her health perhaps broken by the severe fasting regime she embraced. Saint Jerome received criticism from her death and eventually left Rome for Jerusalem with Saint Paula and Saint Blaesilla’s sister, Saint Eustochium.
Some modern historians have described her death as the first recorded instance of anorexia nervosa, a rather daring diagnosis of an unseen patient over more than sixteen centuries.
