Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

happening to her to imagine the horrible consequences of being taken to the extreme of either scale – perhaps ‘going out altogether, like a candle’. Alice is in a world where measurement – and even number itself – can no longer be relied upon, as she finds when she tries to recite her multiplication tables and they too come out wrong.
    Gulliver’s measure of things, on the other hand, remains rock-steady. He confidently describes the tallest trees in Lilliput as ‘seven foot high’, while in Brobdingnag one of the reapers who find him hoists him aloft ‘above sixty foot from the ground’. The reader understands from this that Gulliver retains his proper size. Calculations are a feature of Gulliver’s Travels , too, most notably when the Lilliputians calculate that they must feed Gulliver 1,728 times as much food as they require for themselves, since Gulliver is twelve times their size in all three dimensions (and twelve cubed is 1,728).
    Alice clearly changes size down the rabbit hole, whereas Gulliver visits different-sized lands. In both stories, though, the rule of law is strenuously asserted. ‘You’ve no right to grow here ,’ the Dormouse admonishes Alice as she begins to resume her proper scale in preparation for her return above ground. ‘Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court ,’ barks the King. The Emperor of Lilliput likewise imposes conditions on Gulliver: ‘First, the Man-Mountain shall not depart from our dominions, without our licence under our great seal.’ Size matters, and being the wrong size calls for disciplinary measures to bring the offender back into line.
    Today, we have largely relinquished the notion of ideal man. The eighteenth-century painter and cartoonist William Hogarth declared that it was impossible to find geometry in human faces, and celebrated their irregularity in his satirical caricatures. In a section headed ‘Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in the Human Species’ in his famous essay of 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , Edmund Burke refuted the whole concept, pointing out that ‘ideal’ proportions could be found in people judged beautiful and ugly alike. ‘You may assign any proportion you please to every part of the human body; and I undertake that a painter shall religiously observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure.’ He reserved special criticism for Vitruvian man. Man was never based on a square; he was, if anything, more like its opposite, a cross. ‘The human figure never supplied the architect with any of his ideas.’
    Thanks to a Belgian pioneer of statistics and social science, Adolphe Quetelet, we have now instead the idea of ‘average’ man and woman, a development in thinking about humanity that required the invention of statistics, with its concept of mean (average) and standard deviation (the extent of the variance either side of the average). Quetelet was the first to gather systematic data on human height and weight, introducing the concept of the average man ( l’homme moyen ) in a book of 1835. Quetelet even found a way to decouple the two measures, so that people could be usefully described as heavy or light for their size , introducing the index now named after him, better known to most of us as the body-mass index.
    Quetelet’s new approach gave licence for a vast exercise in data collection. The field of study that emerged was christened anthropometry a few years later. In recognizing that one person was physically different from another and that measuring those variations might yield useful information, the anthropometrists implicitly acknowledged that one human was as valid as another and so in effect rejected the concept of ideal man.
    Such data was too powerful to be left solely in the hands of scientists. In the Museum of the Prefecture of Police in Paris is a reconstruction of an unusual