It’s not entirely accurate to say there were no scales at all to weigh yourself during the Renaissance. There was at least one, designed and built by a Paduan physician called Santorio Santorio (1561–1636). He was interested in finding out what the body did with food, so he created a weighing machine that could accommodate an entire person. He said he weighed ‘hundreds’ of people on his machine, plus the weight of all the food and drink they ate, and the weight of their urine and faeces, thus proving that the body somehow used up some of what it consumed.
