Obesity and genius.

Date:
[after 1890]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Obesity and genius. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Obesity and Genius. sc::z::::r • N. PAGANINI. I DANIEL LAMBERT. T has passed into an aphorism. Through the literature of the world, of every country, of every &ge, there runs the implication that a fat body and a lean wit are allied. Vice versa, a thin body, say the wiseacres, accom- panies a clever intellect. No one is so fond of harping on this string as Shakespeare, with his blundering Falstaff, his gaunt and enter- prising Cassius, And it is the same with unwritten wisdom—the universal folk-lore— with its “ Fat and folly are ever mated/’ “ A fat paunch and a lean pate/’ “ The world to win you must be thin,” “Fat feeds on brains,” and such-like proverbs by the score. You remember Byron’s horror of growing corpulent and his saying to Rogers, “The moment a man becomes fat Death has already come to that man.” Frederick the Great, too, said on one occa- sion, “ There are two kinds of men in the world—fat and thin—and none of the fat ones command my regiments.” Such, touched on briefly, is the situation so far as public opinion generally regards obesity. And now comes along the German Professor Bertholdt, with the startling dictum that the world, perhaps (there is much virtue in that vielleicht), owes most to its fat men, that obesity is one of the greatest blessings that Providence has sent to man, and that with it come perseverance, virtue, and content- ment. All this was occasioned by a Socialist gibe at the German Chancellor, Prince von Biilow, for being corpulent—“ battening,” sneered the Chancellor’s enemy, “ on the wrongs and necessities of the poor.” “ Evil the day,” continued Professor Bertholdt, “ when we Germans become a lean race like some of our neighbours. As for great deeds and high scholarship, I have known many noble men and sound scholars and they have nearly all been fat.” Have we here a paradox ? Is it really true that fatness and genius are allied ? One knows the persistence of popular delusions, of unjust dicta that hold good for ages just because someone uttered them hundreds of years ago and people go on repeating the legends. Then, full of suspicion and a brand-new idea, we turn to the great critic Lessing, and find him actually delivering his opinion that Shakespeare was a “ large, stout man.” Think of it—Shakespeare, who was always poking fun at stout men, a fat man himself! Yet there is something certainly of confirmation in the Stratford bust, and the Garrick theory that he died of apoplexy (although, by the by, the author of “ Sherlock Holmes,” in his last book, de- duces the fact that really the bard succumbed to locomotor ataxy). Albeit, once we have struck out on this