Pearls of wisdom: eat, drink, have sex (using condoms), abstain from smoking and be merry

Abstract

This issue of the IJE contains two papers, initially published more than a century apart, demonstrating increased mortality amongst thin and fat people, with the lowest mortality amongst the overweight but not obese.1,2 This juxtaposition led me to reflect on the IJE’s commitment to reprinting often obscure historical papers. One other journal, Human Biology under the editorship of its founder, the polymath Raymond Pearl (1879–1940; Figure 1), was as committed to this activity as we are. In 1936, Pearl said: It has long been one of the writer’s major tenets of faith that a real and definite interest in the history of science in general and particularly in that of his own special field should be part of the equipment of every scientific worker, and that this interest should at least occasionally translate itself into action by the doing of some actual research in the field. If the history of science should ever be left wholly [Pearl’s emphasis] to professional historians of science (which it presumably never will be) something rather important would be lost from the picture. The specialist in any branch of science inevitably has something in the way of attitude towards the historical development of his specialty, and critical insight into its meaning, that one who is not a specialist in that particular branch can probably never acquire. Consequently I have been accustomed to urge the students, assistants and colleagues in my laboratory to do some real work, however modest, upon the historical aspects of their subject.3 strenuous and indeed somewhat fantastic efforts to give this index physical and biological interpretation, the fact is it has no clear or significant physical meaning. What conceivable interest can inhere in a statement of the number of units of body weight associated with a unit part of a theoretical plane got by squaring the stature – a plane that corresponds to no conceivable biological reality?8

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