Quote of the Day

[Content Note: Fat hatred; medical malfeasance; eliminationism.]

"In 1952, Norman Jolliffe, the director of New York's Bureau of Nutrition, warned doctors at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association that 'a new plague, although an old disease, has arisen to smite us.' He estimated that 25 to 30 percent of the American population at the time was overweight or obese, a number he essentially made up. 'No one loves a fat girl except possibly a fat boy, and together they waddle through life with a roly-poly family,' wrote Paul Craig, a physician from Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1955. Craig was enthusing over a 1907 study that claimed 'gratifying results...on the problem of obesity' by putting people on 800-calories-a-day diets and dosing them liberally with amphetamines, phenobarbital, and methylcellulose. ...[M]edical experts believed that 'any level of thinness was healthier than being fat,' writes Nita Mary McKinley, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new treatments for obesity, including stereotactic surgery, also known as psychosurgery, which involved burning lesions into the hypothalamuses of people with 'gross obesity.' Jaw wiring was another invasive procedure that gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s."—From Harriet Brown's "How Obesity Became a Disease."

This is what is done to fat people under the auspices of "concern for our health." We are shamed, pathologized, mutilated, drugged, starved. By medical professionals.

[H/Ts to Scott Madin and Erica C. Barnett.]