'She was like a bride, they said, festooned in ribbons and bows, a large crucifix resting on her bosom,' records Si‰n Busby in 'A Wonderful Little Girl'. 'She' was Sarah Jacob, who made the headlines in 1869 as the 'Welsh Fasting Girl'.

Sarah was a farmer's daughter in the village of Llanfihangel-ar-arth in Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire. At the age of ten, she experienced some kind of viral illness, which left her afterwards subject to violent fits and partial paralysis. She took to her bed, stopped eating, and devoted herself to reading the Bible.

So impressed was her local vicar by her seeming piety and her wondrous ability to do without food (or even water) that he wrote to the local paper in February 1869 to suggest that it might be 'worth their while for medical men to make an investigation into the nature of this strange case'. By December Sarah was dead - but not before inciting an intense debate in the popular press after reports on the stream of visitors who were making their way to her bedside in search of a miracle.

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