Medicine: Eating Round the Clock

With intestines shortened, a woman needs eleven meals a day

Gunvor Rosen's diet would put a trucker to shame. Several truckers, in fact. Each day the Swede tucks in the equivalent of 15 eggs, 6½ Ibs. of potatoes, 41/2 Ibs. of pork and liver, one package of bacon, four steaks, twelve slices of roast beef, two quarts of ice cream, 1 Ib. of butter, several loaves of bread, 20 quarts of tea and light beer.

Rosen, 44, needs all this food —enough to feed a family of eight—as a result of treatment for a mysterious and frustrating intestinal disorder, Crohn's disease. A chronic...