In the Introduction, Hendren discusses the development of the scientific concept of an "average" person, as characterized by the 19th century French scientist Adolphe Quetelet, whose ideas led to the Body Mass Index. However, in the chapter Chair, she also notes that Gilbert Daniels, a Naval lieutenant, discovered there was no such thing in 1977.
"French statistician Adolphe Quetelet adapted the practice of scientific averaging—used by astronomers to minimize errors in measurement, for example—to the science of human traits made into statistics. Quetelet claimed that his idea of l’homme moyen, or 'the average man,' could be measured and therefore ranked, both in physical and in moral qualities."
(What Can a Body Do?, p. 11, emphasis added)
Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874 by As an example of the lasting effects of Quetelet's scale to measure the average body, now known as the Body Mass Index, here are two recent articles from the medical field.
In the 1970s, Lt. Gilbert Daniels tried to ascertain how the military's design choices worked for the average pilot but realized the fallacy of this goal:
“The tendency to think in terms of the ‘average man’ is a pitfall into which many persons blunder when attempting to apply human body size data to design problems. Actually it is virtually impossible to find an ‘average man’ in the Air Force population. This is not because of any unique traits of this group of men, but because of the great variability of bodily dimensions which is characteristic of all men. It in the intent of this Technical Note to point out and explain some of the factors that lead to the difficulties arising from the use of ‘average’ dimensions and to indicate to some extent how they may be avoided.”
(Daniels, 1977, p. 1, emphasis added)
