In 1922, the Commissioner of Health for Chicago had a scale installed in the lobby of City Hall. Any and all passersby were invited to come in, step on, and find out what they weighed. City residents soon flocked to the building and lined up all day long to check their weight. The scale was the hottest ticket in town.
Thirty years earlier, most Americans had no idea what they weighed — nor did their physicians. Doctors and hospitals had had scales since the 1870s; they just weren’t a part of standard health evaluations. Certainly, there were sociocultural attitudes and biases about body size and shape, but weight was a subjective concept. It wasn’t until the turn of the century when a confluence of events gave rise to both a massive interest in quantifying weight and the tools to do so — one tool in particular: the bathroom scale.
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