Someone called my attention to a New York Times Magazine photo spread called Bodies of Work, showing the various body types of athletes who practice different sports. Interestingly, both the male shot putter (height 6'5", weight 335 lbs) and the female weight lifter (height 5'9", weight 300 lbs) with their respective BMIs of 40 and 44 would probably both be considered "morbidly obese." "Sneer quotes" around the BMI categorizations are fully justified.

But if the late psychologist William Sheldon (1898-1977) was right, this variety of body types in athletes and everyone else shouldn't surprise us at all.





I will confess that as an anthropology student, I used to pore over Sheldon's 1954 Atlas of Men. The university library had one frayed copy which sat on a special reserve shelf behind the counter, out of the prying eyes and grubby hands of undergraduates who wanted to look at naked men in a socially acceptable way. Sheldon collected in the Atlas about 1200 photographs of mostly college students, and classified them according to a numerical analysis system based on various body measurements into three major "somatotypes". Endomorphs were round and generally fat; mesomorphs were broad-shouldered, well-muscled, and lean, and ectomorphs thin and wiry, with little muscle definition. The names were drawn from the three different types of embryonic tissues which differentiate into body organs - the mesoderm which becomes the muscles; the endoderm which becomes the digestive and other internal systems, and the ectoderm, which becomes the skin and nerves.

There was a bit of a scandal when Sheldon attempted to put together a comparable Atlas of Women, and the project was shut down. Later, in the 1990s, Sheldon's original photographs were destroyed by various universities, because "informed consent" hadn't been obtained. Apparently incoming students to Ivy League universities in the 1940s to the late 1950s were often photographed nude, as a "public health" measure (to check for rickets, scoliosis, effects of tuberculosis, etc.) Sheldon used the opportunity to standardize the photographs and evaluate them for his somatotypic scale.

One amusing anecdote - because Sheldon was working with college students, he never could find enough endomorphs, especially the extreme endomorphs which he required. He used to send graduate students out through the streets of Cambridge and the rest of Boston with instructions to seek out "the fattest men they could find," so to ask them to participate in somatotype photography. (I think I read this in Sheldon's The Varieties of Human Physique: An Introduction to Constitutional Psychology; it's been a long time, though.) The graduate students must have done a thorough job, because Sheldon does document some splendid examples of extremely fat men.



An endomorphic Bulgarian sumotori (left) with his more mesomorphic opponent.


People in athletics still pay attention to somatotype, though, because it does relate to which sports people can excel in. It's interesting how all the three different somatotypes are present in the NY Times spread - the endomorphic female weight lifter; the ectomorphic marathon runner; the mesomorphic 200-meter track runner; the shot putter whose combination of endomorphy and mesomorphy gives him a coat of softness over his musculature.

Sheldon's downfall came through his generally unsuccessful attempts to statistically prove that these body types corresponded to specific personalities, as well as his erratic, eccentric writing style, which was definitely not academically dry or boring. His suggestion that the somatotypes were largely inherited seems obvious when one sees how body types do persist across generations. Sheldon maintained that while one could starve an endomorph, fatten an ectomorph, or cause a mesomorph to lose muscle tone through inactivity, the basic body types were pretty much inflexible.

I think it's time to revisit Sheldon's work, especially as a way to understand how bodies can widely vary through genetic and constitutional factors outside of medical control. As the NY Times photos show, even within the scope of athletes (who are generally culturally deemed "healthy" and worthy of emulation), there are wide scopes of sizes, weights, and physical types.