From time immemorial men have had the idea that people of different body shapes have different temperaments. Despite exceptions, fat people seem in general to be jolly, gregarious, lazy, comfort-loving; thin, wiry or bony people are often secretive, seclusive, introverted;* powerful giants are supposed to be self-assured, mild-mannered and softspoken. Making the maximum possible allowance for environmental conditioning, most biologists insist that there must be some relation left between behavior and physical constitution.
What are the relations between body structure and glands? Between body structure and temperament, insanity, criminal tendencies, immunity and susceptibility to disease, nutritional requirements, sex needs, rate of maturing, length of life? Few years ago a smart, quiet, pleasant young man named William Herbert Sheldon began to think hard about these clouded questions.
A Rhode Islander who had spent some time cowpunching in the West, William Sheldon took his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Chicago. When he became interested in constitutional psychology, he saw that he ought to know a good deal about anatomy and physiology, so he spent three more years getting a medical degree, another year as a hospital intern. From Chicago, from Harvard, where he transferred four years ago, and a few other universities, he collected some 4,000 photographs of freshmen, taken in the nude from the front, side and rear under controlled and uniform conditions so they could be precisely measured and compared. He added some clinically obtained data on women and older men for the sake of perspective.
Dr. Sheldon became convinced of two things:
1) That much brilliant research on glands had been wasted. Since glands are only part of the whole body, Sheldon deemed it more profitable to start with the whole. "Glands," he said, "probably determine personality only in the same sense that the long bones and the short ones, and the gut and the muscles and the skin, and the rest ... of the body determine personality."
2) That previous attempts, including those of famed Ernst Kretschmer of Germany, to sort human physiques had bogged down in a welter of mixed types, subtypes, hybrid types, etc., because individuals would not fit preconceived categories. Sheldon attacked the pigeonholing problem from another angle: that of three structural components or characteristics (of his own devising) body measurements would enable an investigator to determine, for any person, the strength of each component. That strength could be rated numerically on a scale of 1 (almost complete absence) to 7 (almost complete dominance). Then the individual's body type would be a three-digit number showing his quantity of each component—such as 443, 172, 236. There would be no individual who would not "fit."
Dr. Sheldon does not claim that mere body-typing solves the relation of physique to all aspects of temperament. But he does claim that efficient and "meaningful" body-typing lays the groundwork for solving such problems.