The E-Sylum:  Volume 6, Number 8, February 23, 2003, Article 4

SHELDON'S PHOTO PROJECT

  David Fanning writes: "I was reading an article on the Atlantic
  Monthly online about Yale's "Sex Week," when, oddly enough,
  the author started talking about William Sheldon.

  [Sheldon is the author of "Early American Cents", the classic
  reference in the field.  His photo project has been discussed
  previously in The E-Sylum  (Volume 3, Number 47, November
  12, 2000, among other references) -Editor]

 Fanning goes on: "I knew about Sheldon's research, but I was
 interested in seeing how this person described it:

  "...But nudity does figure in another remarkable Yale scandal,
  one in which I was both exposed and exposer, so to speak,
  which took place a few blocks north of Skull and Bones, at
  the Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

  "This was 'The Great Ivy League Nude Posture-Photo Scandal.'
  Yale was not alone in being victimized by the posture-photo
  scandal: just about every Ivy League and Seven Sisters school
  from the 1930s to the 1960s was inveigled into allowing photos
  of nude or lingerie-clad freshmen to be taken and then
  transferred to the 'research archives' of a megalomaniac
  pseudo-scientist, W. H. Sheldon. Sheldon believed that the
  secret of all human character and fate could be reduced to a
  three-digit number derived from various 'postural relationships'
  (the photos were taken with metal pins affixed to the spine to
  define the arc of curvature). I was the reporter who discovered,
  in 1995, that all these nude photos of America's elite--tens of
  thousands of them, anyway--were available for viewing by
  'qualified researchers' in an obscure archive of the Smithsonian
  Institution.

  "I don't know if this can be classified as a sex scandal, exactly,
  but it demonstrates the tendency of a certain strain of academic
  to find a way to abstract from an actual body to a body of
  mathematical relationships--to pure number rather than impure
  flesh, if possible."

  You can read the entire article at:
  http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/rosenbaum.htm

  You've got to watch those coin fellas, huh?"

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization 
promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.

To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor 
at this address: whomren@coinlibrary.com

To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum