The day the elite of the first world were treated like us poor mortals
When we hear a story about abuse of authority, we always imagine that the victims belong to the underprivileged classes: the poor, immigrants, the sick, the uneducated. But what would you say about a case in which the abused people were systematically from the cultural and economic elite of the Western world? Hard to believe, isn't it? But this story of abuse existed and lasted for decades.
From the 1940s to the 1980s, the universities that are part of the Ivy League, a group of leading higher education institutions in the northeast of the United States, had a bizarre custom as part of their admission process for new students. We're not talking about secret societies of drunken young people or university hazing. It's more serious.
For decades, every new student was sent to a small room on their first day of school to have their posture assessed. After removing all their clothes, the student had to wait calmly for the photographer's assistants to stick 4 inch iron pins into some of their vertebrae, from the base of their spine to their neck, giving them the appearance of a metal porcupine. The front, back and side photos of each of the thousands of men and women subjected to this process would later be sent for study.
This story came to light when, in the 1970s, a Yale University employee decided to venture into the dark corridors of a gothic tower on campus and found thousands of disturbing photos. They were pictures of naked young men with what looked like metal spikes stuck in their backs! He noticed that among these young people were well-known people. The university immediately ordered all these photos to be chopped up and burned, but the scandal was far from being controlled.
It turned out that these files were part of studies carried out at the Ivy League, led mainly by W. H. Sheldon of Harvard University. To each photo was added a label describing the body type as endomorphic, ectomorphic or mesomorphic. This classification was inspired by the theories of social Darwinist Francis Galton, who had proposed the creation of a similar image bank for the population of Victorian England at the end of the 19th century. Each of these physical types was assigned different degrees of intelligence, temperament and ability to succeed in their careers.
Famous people such as George Bush, Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton and Diane Sawyer are among those who have had their photos taken. During the years that followed, these people suffered from episodic rumors that someone had broken the lock on the archives where the photos were stored and sold them to some blackmailer.
Evil tongues say that instead of being used to study posture, these photos were part of a university eugenics experiment, conducted by scientists whose concern was to develop an American super race. They suggest that the photos of the boys and girls of the ruling class were used to create image albums available for consultation by those interested in marriages that would result in healthy offspring, in accordance with the precepts of eugenics, so fashionable in the USA at the time. Could this be just an urban legend?
Harley Holden, curator of the Harvard archives, has repeatedly stated that all of Sheldon's photos were destroyed 15 years ago to protect the privacy of those photographed. However, several of these photos appeared in Sheldon's book on body types, Atlas of Men.
Investigations by a NY Times reporter, who was also a victim of this procedure, revealed that tens of thousands of photos escaped the flames. However, in the process, Sheldon became strongly discredited and lost the support of universities, which did not want to get involved in the nude photo scandal. After a long search for an institution that would agree to house Sheldon's archives, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington finally offered to store them in the National Anthropological Archives.
Although today access to these photos is heavily censored, and you have to apply and wait weeks for permission, reporter Ron Rosenbaum was allowed to research this material. What he describes are photos of naked men, mostly relaxed and calm. This is probably due to the fact that at the time of the photos, men had a less puritanical upbringing with regard to their bodies than today. They were often naked in the presence of their peers while bathing, or summarily dressed in water sports at all-male educational institutions. But the women...
Brought up to be modest, coy and hide their bodies from the gaze of strangers, as well as being subject to countless demands of beauty, thinness and muscle tone, the women almost all appeared downcast and humiliated. What's more, the photographers and their assistants were men and strangers.
A lesson emerges from this deeply unpleasant event: given that scientific theories can later be discredited, because not every scientific experiment has solid foundations, the authorities should not allow studies that put people's privacy at risk to be done compulsorily. Wouldn't this be the case with the authorizations negotiated by clinical analysis laboratories to share our health test results? We'll find out the day our health insurance company refuses to renew the policy if we don't accept an absurd increase in the monthly fee because of our latest blood test results.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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