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Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18891, 5 January 1927, Page 2

It is all very well to jest at the efforts of eminent physicians to reduce the exuberant adiposity of the eminent, and one is reminded that half the world spends unlimited sums in trying to get fat, and the other half outruns the constable trying to get thin. In one's youth a Harky street specialist, Sir Landon Yandaleur, really did achieve something. His cure for obesity was the common or beer barrel. A nine-gallon keg would do for some people, while more generous examples of the cooper's art (even up to the hogshead) were recommended for people of larger size. In Mayfair (and indeed generally in the West End) famous hostesses held "barrel afternoons," to which they invited all their fat friends, and it was forbidden that any of the servants should laugh, as a duchess, lying across a barrel, solemnly rolled across the drawing-room carpet, propelled by her noble feet. The fashion went out when an obese diplomat from Berlin, during a barrel afternoon in Park lane, rolled over a landing and was precipitated down a famous staircase; a member of the Cabinet pronouncing it "vulgar." A tall, thin man requires more food than a short, fat one, even though both are of the same weight, according to a Japanese doctor, who declares that the amount of food needed depends upon the total area, not the weight of the body.