The Fat Person on the Edgware Road Omnibus: Fat, Fashion, and Public Shaming in the British Long Eighteenth Century

摘要

Fat and Fashion: It was the long eighteenth century that was the first real age of weight watching. The weight being watched over the course of time came to be seen as a product of the mind, not solely of the body. Yet this fascination arose out of the display of what was perceived as bodily excess in an ever-widening public sphere. Public weighing machines ("steelyards") were developed in France and first appeared in 1760 in London. While initially seen as a means for the state control of goods such as coal, they quickly came to reflect a growing fascination with bodily weight. They were based on a radically new (if not completely accurate) understanding of metabolism as the balance between consumption and activity, a view that dated back at least as far as 1614, when the Paduan physiologist Sanctorius Sanctorius reported in his De statica medicine that what he consumed weighed less than what he excreted-and that the missing weight had been perspired (a sign of health). Sanctorious himself recommended the regular weighing of the body to promote the maintenance of a consistent weight, asserting that "the exact standard of good health" is the weight "which is to any one such as that when he goes up some steep place, he feels himself lighter than he is wont."1