Atlas of Men: A guide for somatotyping the adult male at all ages

by William H. Sheldon

very fully illustrated

Genres: Psychology

First published January 1, 1949

Reviews

[Nelson Minar]

Fascinating and weird quack science, featuring many pictures of naked men.

[Raluca-Denisa Carp]

bullshit

[Larry-bob Roberts]

I went to the public library to check out this classic of unethical research and pseudoscience filled with nude photos of 1950s college students. Don't worry, faces and genitals are blocked out. It's even wackier than I expected - not only does he divide everyone up along three scales from 1 to 7 of endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy, but for each of the 88 "somatypes" he gives an animal totem. For instance somatype 4-6-1 (about halfway on the fat scale, almost all the way on the muscle scale, and at the bottom of the skinny scale) he says "Grizzly bears. First cousins of the mesomorphic royalty, or the royalty grown heavier and lazier, having lost some of its taste for fresh meat and now eating mainly more easily captured things like roots and berries."

After noting that 7-1-1 (the fattest somatype) is "Among the children confined in the New York State Home for the feebleminded... not such an extreme rarity," he continues to say "this may not mean that children of such a somatype are naturally of low intelligence, but that, being a 711, one needs more intelligence to get by." How kind!

The planned next volume, "Atlas of Women" never appeared.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Leag... and the New York Times articles linked from there.