ster. He did not
differ from other youths until fourteen. He started to learn the trade
of a die-sinker and engraver in Birmingham. At about nineteen he began
to believe he would be very heavy and developed great strength. He
could lift 500 pounds with ease and could kick seven feet high while
standing on one leg. In 1793 he weighed 448 pounds; at this time he
became sensitive as to his appearance. In June, 1809, he weighed 52
stone 11 pounds (739 pounds), and measured over 3 yards around the body
and over 1 yard around the leg. He had many visitors, and it is said
that once, when the dwarf Borwilaski came to see him, he asked the
little man how much cloth he needed for a suit. When told about 3/4 of
a yard, he replied that one of his sleeves would be ample. Another
famous fat man was Edward Bright, sometimes called "the fat man of
Essex." He weighed 616 pounds. In the same journal that records
Bright's weight is an account of a man exhibited in Holland who weighed
503 pounds.

Wadd, a physician, himself an enormous man, wrote a treatise on obesity
and used his own portrait for a frontispiece. He speaks of Doctor
Beddoes, who was so uncomfortably fat that a lady of Clifton called him
a "walking feather bed." He mentions Doctor Stafford, who was so
enormous that this epitaph was ascribed to him:--

"Take heed, O good traveler! and do not tread hard, For here lies Dr.
Stafford, in all this churchyard."

Wadd has gathered some instances, a few of which will be cited. At
Staunton, January 2, 1816, there died Samuel Sugars, Gent., who weighed
with a single wood coffin 50 stone (700 pounds). Jacob Powell died in
1764, weighing 660 pounds. It took 16 men to carry him to his grave.
Mr. Baker of Worcester, supposed to be larger than Bright, was interred
in a coffin that was larger than an ordinary hearse. In 1797 there was
buried Philip Hayes, a professor of music, who was as heavy as Bright
(616 pounds).

Mr. Spooner, an eminent farmer of Warwickshire, who died in 1775, aged
fifty-seven, weighed 569 pounds and measured over 4 feet across the
shoulders. The two brothers Stoneclift of Halifax, Yorkshire, together
weighed 980 pounds.

Keysler in his travels speaks of a corpulent Englishman who in passing
through Savoy had to use 12 chairmen; he says that the man weighed 550
pounds. It is recorded on the tombstone of James Parsons, a fat man of
Teddington, who died March 7, 1743, that he had often eaten a whole
shoulder