How Fat Detectives Think

Abstract

If there is a moment when fat takes on a positive meaning in defining the masculine quality of the “fat man” it is at the close of the nineteenth century. It is in the body of the “fat detective” that obesity or at least corpulence begins to define and be defined by the mental processes of the detective. How a fat detective thinks is different and defines his male body. Steven Shapin, a short, rather rotund scholar of the history of science, wrote a striking essay on the eating habits of skinny philosopher-scientists.¹ His argument is that, at least in the West, there is a powerful myth as early as Marsilio Ficino’s Renaissance book on the health of the scholar, about the need for such men to have a “lean and hungry look.”² That all of Shapin’s examples are men is not incidental. Our collective fantasy of the appropriate body of the male thinker stands at the center of Shapin’s work. I want to ask the corollary question: What happens to the image of the “thinking male” when that male body is fat, even obese? Shapin’s point is that Sir Isaac Newton, that proverbial thinker who is reputed to have forgotten whether he had eaten his chicken or not, actually died hugely bloated like so many academics. There is a great disparity between the way we imagine bodies should look and function and our mythmaking about them. In complicated ways, the fat detective is the antithesis of the lean philosopher.