Medicine: Body Types

Although it is possible to control the weight of the body by diet and exercise, it is an everyday observation that some persons grow fat while eating relatively small amounts of food and apparently without relation to the amount of exercise they take. Others remain slender while consuming large quantities of candy, cream, milk, butter. Scientists are convinced that the body build is controlled to a considerable extent by heredity and other factors, such as some governing influence in the cells.

The eugenics record office of the Carnegie Institution in Washington has just published a report of its studies on the subject. The investigators find that body build seems to be controlled by many factors, with fleshiness tending slightly to dominate over slenderness. There is a marked tendency for persons of similar build to intermarry, and this process of selection tends to perpetuate the inheritance of certain types of body structure. The statistics indicate also that some diseases are particularly associated with slender build: tuberculosis, pneumonia, nervousness, melancholia; whereas diabetes, inflammation of the kidneys, apoplexy, hardening of the arteries and numerous diseases of the stomach and intestines are associated with fleshy people.

Physicians at the Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan, have also initiated a series of studies on body constitution in relation to disease. Their first studies, made on 50 patients with gall-bladder disease and 39 patients with ulcers of the stomach or intestines, indicated that persons who are heavy in relation to their height are more likely to have gall-bladder disease than are other persons. They also found that a wide angle between the ribs, at the point where they diverge in front, is a frequent finding in infections of the gallbladder. And they observed that the jaws and teeth of persons with gall-bladder disturbances were likely to differ in measurements from those of normal persons. While none of the points noted was absolute, the conditions recurred with a surprising consistency in the patients examined. A complete investigation may yet lead to observations of great importance in the diagnosis of disease.