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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    new line one hardly knows how to encounter all the rude surprises that greet the man who foolishly clings to the centuries-old fable (was it not Carlyle who said it, and Tolstoi who quotes it maliciously ?) that “ no fat fellow ever did anything in the world that was really worth the doing.” What a jump from this ito our German savant’s obiter dictum that [the fat men have done nearly everything [worth doing ! But first a word as to the mystery of fat. [You meet a man in the street and put the question to him, and lo ! it is no mystery at jail. “ If a man eats and sleeps and loafs he gets fat. That’s why I believe in dieting frnd hard work.” Could anything be more hbsurd than this theory ? [Was Napoleon, working twenty hours out of the twenty-four, sleep- ing too much ? And not only work, but a perpetual supervision, the mind on the rack, the nerves never relaxed. And yet, diet and work as he would, he got fatter and fatter, and never once did his fatness obscure his genius or cause his flame to burn less ardently. A man who would gravely ascribe the Russian disaster and the Waterloo defeat to the Imperial aggregation of adipose tissue has little real knowledge of Napoleon or of history. Napoleon was born to be a fat man—all the Bonapartes became fat at thirty, and even before — it was not a question of diet or sleep or work or exercise^ -the cells of fat went on in due process of time to cover their bodies, DUMAS. VOLTAIRE.