ABSTRACT
Weighing the body is definitely a marker of the twentieth century; however, there is some evidence that people started to weigh themselves using various instruments in previous centuries. The first public weighing machines were developed in France in the seventeenth century and first appeared in 1760 in London. The medical theory regarding physical weight had been developed by the Venetian Sanctorius Sanctorius in late sixteenth-century Padua. Sanctorius monitored his body weight for thirty years. He announced in his De statica medicine (1614) that what he consumed weighed more than what he excreted and assumed that the missing weight had been perspired, a sign of health. He, therefore, recommended the regular weighing of the body to promote health. In his aphorisms, he also argued against too rapid weight gain or loss, for “when the body is one day of one weight, and another day of another, it argues an introduction of evil qualities” (Sanctorius 1806: 129). But he implied that too great a weight gain is itself pathological: “That weight, which is to any one such as that when he goes up some steepy place, he feels himself lighter that he is wont, is the exact standard of good health” (Sanctorius 1806: 129). Consistent weight and mobility define health, and the act of weighing oneself in public became a measure of public accountability for one’s health. Sanctorius discovered that some amount of weight was not accounted for and figured out that this weight was lost by “insensible perspiration.” Today, this loss is explained by human metabolism. The energy from the food is turned into heat to maintain body temperature around 98 degrees Fahrenheit.
