There was a girl who died at Plaisance near Paris in 1890 who weighed 470 pounds or more. In 1889 an impresario undertook to exhibit her; but eight men could not move her from her room, and as she could not pass through the door the idea was abandoned.
There was a colored woman who died near Baltimore who weighed 850pounds, exceeding the great Daniel Lambert by 120 pounds. The journal reporting this case quotes the Medical Record as saying that there was a man in North Carolina, who was born in 1798, who was 7 feet 8 inches tall and weighed over 1000 pounds, probably the largest man that ever lived. Hutchison says that he Saw in the Infirmary at Kensington, under Porter's care, a remarkable example of obesity. The woman was only just able to walk about and presented a close resemblance to Daniel Lambert. Obesity forced her to leave her occupation. The accumulation of fat on the abdomen, back, and thighs was enormous.
According to a recent number of La Liberte, a young woman of Pennsylvania, although only sixteen years old, weighs 450 pounds.
Her waist measures 61 inches in circumference and her neck 22inches. The same paper says that on one of the quays of Paris may be seen a wine-shop keeper with whom this Pennsylvania girl could not compare. It is said that this curiosity of the Notre-Dame quarter uses three large chairs while sitting behind her specially constructed bar. There is another Paris report of a man living in Switzerland who weighs more than 40 stone (560 pounds)and eats five times as much as an ordinary person. When traveling he finds the greatest difficulty in entering an ordinary railway carriage, and as a rule contents himself in the luggage van.
Figure 171 represents an extremely fat woman with a well-developed beard. To end this list of obese individuals, we mention an old gentleman living in San Francisco who, having previously been thin, gained 14 pounds in his seventieth year and 14 pounds each of seven succeeding years.
Simulation of Obesity.--General dropsy, elephantiasis, lipomata, myxedema, and various other affections in which there is a hypertrophic change of the connective tissues may be mistaken for general obesity; on the other hand, a fatty, pendulous abdomen may simulate the appearances of pregnancy or even of ovarian cyst.
Dercum of Philadelphia has described a variety of obesity which he has called "adiposis dolorosa," in which there is an enormous growth of fat, sometimes limited, sometimes spread all over the body, this condition differing from that of general lipomatosis in its rarity, in the mental symptoms, in the headache, and the generally painful condition complained of. In some of the cases examined by Dercum he found that the thyroid was indurated and infiltrated by calcareous deposits. The disease is not myxedema because there is no peculiar physiognomy, no spade-like hands nor infiltrated skin, no alteration of the speech, etc. Dercum considers it a connective- tissue dystrophy--a fatty metamorphosis of various stages, possibly a neuritis. The first of Dercum's cases was a widow of Irish birth, who died both alcoholic and syphilitic. When forty-eight or forty-nine her arms began to enlarge. In June, 1887, the enlargement affected the shoulders ,arms, back, and sides of the chest. The parts affected were elastic, and there was no pitting. In some places the fat was lobulated, in others it appeared as though filled with bundles of worms. The skin was not thickened and the muscles were not involved. In the right arm there was unendurable pain to the touch, and this was present in a lesser degree in the left arm.