ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the sources of current views on obesity back to the early decades of the twentieth century. It develops a historical and sociological model to indicate how investigators have fashioned multiple scientific identities by participating in diverse scientific communities and traditions. By World War II, many naturalist and anthropometric investigators of overweight suffered guilt by association, whether well-founded or unfortunate, with "pseudosciences" such as humoral typology, physiognomy, phrenology, and racial hygiene. At the turn of the century, clinicians, dietary reformers, public health fieldworkers, and medical anthropologists sharing "constitutional" frameworks often found their institutional-disciplinary situations less stable and secure than those of their more specialized, "mechanistic" counterparts. The chapter suggests that, through participation within particular biomedical communities and their respective traditions, researchers and practitioners investigating obesity attempted to reconfigure their intermural, hybrid, "dysplastic" identities into more stable, coherent, "euplastic" positions and service roles.
