of mutton and a peck of hasty pudding. Keysler mentions a
young Englishman living in Lincoln who was accustomed to eat 18 pounds
of meat daily. He died in 1724 at the age of twenty-eight, weighing 530
pounds. In 1815 there died in Trenaw, in Cornwall, a person known as
"Giant Chillcot." He measured at the breast 6 feet 9 inches and weighed
460 pounds. One of his stockings held 6 gallons of wheat. In 1822 there
was reported to be a Cambridge student who could not go out in the
daytime without exciting astonishment. The fat of his legs overhung his
shoes like the fat in the legs of Lambert and Bright. Dr. Short
mentions a lady who died of corpulency in her twenty-fifth year
weighing over 50 stone (700 pounds). Catesby speaks of a man who
weighed 500 pounds, and Coe mentions another who weighed 584 pounds.
Fabricius and Godart speak of obesity so excessive as to cause death.
There is a case reported from the French of a person who weighed 800
pounds. Smetius speaks of George Fredericus, an office-holder in
Brandenburgh, who weighed 427 pounds.

Dupuytren gives the history of Marie Francoise-Clay, who attained such
celebrity for her obesity. She was born in poverty, reached puberty at
thirteen, and married at twenty-five, at which age she was already the
stoutest woman of her neighborhood notwithstanding her infirmity. She
followed her husband, who was an old-clothes dealer, afoot from town to
town. She bore six children, in whom nothing extraordinary was noticed.
The last one was born when she was thirty-five years old. Neither the
births, her travels, nor her poverty, which sometimes forced her to beg
at church doors, arrested the progress of the obesity. At the age of
forty she was 5 feet 1 inch high and one inch greater about the waist.
Her head was small and her neck was entirely obliterated. Her breasts
were over a yard in circumference and hung as low as the umbilicus. Her
arms were elevated and kept from her body by the fat in her axillae.
Her belly was enormous and was augmented by six pregnancies. Her thighs
and haunches were in proportion to her general contour. At forty she
ceased to menstruate and soon became afflicted with organic heart
diseases.

Fournier quotes an instance of a woman in Paris who at twenty-four, the
time of her death, weighed 486 pounds. Not being able to mount any
conveyance or carriage in the city, she walked from place to place,
finding difficulty not in progression, but in keeping her e