Europe, Western

Obesity has increasingly become a major problem in Western Europe owing to excessive eating, eating the wrong foods, some inherited genetic traits, and also for medical reasons, or as a side effect from medicines. Although it is clearly a much greater problem nowadays than it has been previously, there is much evidence of obesity in the history of the region since classical times.

[Page 241]Gluttony as a problem is more associated with the Roman Empire as it became wealthier and lazier, and some of its citizens greatly indulged themselves. The Roman actor Aesopus was well known for the ostentatious vulgarity of his enormous eating habits, and Pliny the Elder was certainly very large. Other obese Romans included the writer Horace and the Emperor Vitellius who was emperor from April to December 69. The Roman physician Galen wrote that there was a man called Nichomachus of Smyrna (modern-day Izmir, Turkey) who was so large that he could not get out of bed. Traditionally, obesity for men tends to be associated with political corruption. In the Celtic world, obesity appears to have been very rare, although rulers such as King Louernius of Gaul are recorded to have indulged themselves and their close supporters with vast feasts, with heavy consumption of meat.

The first king of England who can definitely be said to have suffered from obesity was Henry VIII, evident from contemporary accounts and the size of his armor. One of Henry VIII's ministers, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, also became obese in his later years. John Marriott, a public glutton from the reign of James I, became the subject of a pamphlet The Great Eater of Graye's Inn, or the Life of Mr. Marriott, the Cormorant. It claimed that he had himself once eaten a banquet prepared for 20 people. Samuel Pepys, in his diary, refers to various obese people, including Mr. Mills, the parson, whose size is equated with his laziness. Mention should also be made of the siege of Londonderry in 1688–89 when it was recorded that one extremely fat man refused to go into the streets during the 105-day siege because his neighbors often licked their lips when they saw him. The term “Fat Man in Londonderry” soon became an expression to describe people in similar situations. George Cheyne, a London medical doctor, promoted vegetarianism as a way of controlling body weight and as a possible cure for obesity.

By the 18th century, body size became associated with wealth, although it is clear from paintings that some people were what would now be regarded as obese. Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, became increasingly corpulent in his later years, with some cartoonists considerably exaggerating his size, as they seem to have done with other political and social figures of the period. James Boswell, the biographer and diarist; Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer and author; Frederick, Lord North, prime minister from 1770–82; and Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in his later years, were four well-known individuals of the period who were all extremely corpulent. Although as Prince Regent, George, son of George III, was a handsome man, by the time he acceded to the throne as George IV in 1820, he was extremely overweight.

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