Daniel Lambert

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Daniel Lambert, painting by Benjamin Marshall , 1806

Daniel Lambert (born March 13, 1770 in Leicester , † June 21, 1809 in Stamford ) was probably the heaviest man in the world in his time.

Life

Daniel Lambert was the eldest son of the jailer or head of the Leicester Bridewell Prison, and grew up with three siblings. At the age of fourteen he started working for Benjamin Patrick in Birmingham , who made buttons and buckles. However, Patrick had no economic success in the long term, which is why Lambert finally returned to Leicester, where he now also worked as a prison guard and took over his father's office in the early 1790s. Daniel Lambert was fond of amusements such as swimming, fishing and hunting, and was also a successful breeder of hunting dogs of various breeds.

When he was around twenty years old, he began to experience worrying weight gain, so he started strength training . Nevertheless, he had to give up hunting on horseback in 1801 because his mount could no longer carry him and he would become too out of breath when following the pack.

In 1805 the prison where Lambert worked was closed. Lambert received a severance payment of £ 50 a year for having been very satisfied with his work, although in the years before the institution closed the question had arisen as to whether he was still physically fit to supervise the prisoners. This sum was not enough for him to live in the long run. Although he had always turned away curious people who wanted to marvel at his body, he decided to turn his disposition into a source of income. On April 4, 1806, he drove to London in a special car and stayed at 53 Piccadilly. One day later he began to receive visitors who were allowed to visit him for money. According to a report in The Times , the rush was enormous and women in particular wished to see the 700- pound "human colossus" and were impressed by its intelligent conversation and good manners. He also had numerous visitors from the upper class of society, including King George III. A saying by Józef Boruwłaski , a Pole who is only 99 cm tall and who in turn had been visited by Lambert twenty years earlier, has been passed down: “Ah mine God, I have seen dis face twenty years before at Birmingham, but certainly it be an or body! "(Eng:" Oh my God, I saw this face in Birmingham twenty years ago, but no doubt it was a different body! ") Boruwłaski also checked that Lambert's fullness was not dizzy and could himself convince that the masses were indeed flesh and blood. There are also reports of numerous visits by the actor Charles Mathews to Lambert.

After spending the summer of 1806 in London, Daniel Lambert returned to Leicester a rich man. In December of the same year he presented himself to the public in Birmingham, Hickley and Coventry . In 1807 he lived in Leicester Square in London, but had to interrupt his stay due to illness. In the same year he went on a tour of several provincial cities. In 1808 he showed himself in London and York , in 1809 in Cambridge , Huntington and Stamford. On the morning of June 21, 1809 he suddenly had difficulty breathing while shaving; a few minutes later he was dead. A few days earlier he had been weighed in Ipswich and weighed 739 pounds (about 335 kg).

Much has been speculated about the reasons for Lambert's unusual obesity and the cause of his death. The Dictionary of National Biography names obesity of the heart as the cause of death; Jan Bondeson thinks pulmonary embolism is more likely. Since no autopsy was carried out on Daniel Lambert, no definitive statements can be made about it. It has been proven that Daniel Lambert showed no symptoms of known diseases that can be associated with obesity during his lifetime. The only ailment that the contemporary testimonies mention is painful problems with the leg veins . Diagnoses such as Cushing's syndrome , which would have included symptoms such as a full moon face and muscle weakness, or Prader-Willi syndrome , which would have led to abnormalities in childhood, etc. can therefore be ruled out. Lambert himself is said to have always maintained that he only eats moderately and does not consume alcohol. Bondeson believes that it is possible that Daniel Lambert underestimated the amount of energy he consumed through his diet and that he could no longer get his weight under control after he had given up his physical activities.

funeral

Gravestone in Stamford

Daniel Lambert's body was placed in a coffin on June 22, 1809 with great difficulty . In order to be able to transport it out of the inn room, a wall had to be torn down. The coffin was wheeled and was driven to the grave at the back of St. Martins Church in Stamford on June 23, where 20 men struggled for half an hour until the coffin was finally in the grave. Lambert's friends in Leicester obtained a headstone with a detailed inscription.

Literary and other traces

Posthumous portrait of Lambert from 1821

Daniel Lambert's life has repeatedly been the subject of literary endeavors. A biography of Lambert had already appeared in Granger's Wonderful Museum and Magazine Extraordinary in 1808, and soon after his death J. Drakard published The Life of that Wonderful and Extraordinary Heavy Man, the Late Daniel Lambert . Descriptions of Daniel Lambert's life have also appeared in Smeeton's Biographia Curiosa , Kirby's Wonderful Museum, and Eccentric Magazine . Daniel Lambert as the epitome of fat and giant appears in William Makepeace Thackeray , as well as in Charles Dickens , Thomas Carlyle and many others. In 1981 a play called The Ghost of Daniel Lambert was performed.

Daniel Lambert was painted several times; Above all, however, he appeared in numerous anti-French caricatures in which he embodied Napoleon's opponent, John Bull . In one of these cartoons he can be seen on the horse Monarch , which was considered the largest and strongest horse in the world.

In 1806 a large statue or bust of Lambert was made from wax. It came to the United States and was exhibited in Mix 'Museum in New Haven, Connecticut , in 1813 . In 1828 either this statue or a similar one could be seen in Vauxhall Gardens, Boston, wearing original Daniel Lambert clothing. It was later acquired by PT Barnum and exhibited in his American Museum in New York . In 1865 she fell victim to a fire.

In England numerous pubs and inns were named after Daniel Lambert. In 1826, James Dixon, owner of the Ram Jam Jam restaurant , bought the clothes Daniel Lambert had worn on the day he died and displayed them. Later, dresses by Charles Stratton were added, who also posed several times with Lambert's clothes. Today, Lambert's dresses can still be seen in the Newarke Museum in Leicester, the Stamford Museum and the George Hotel in Stamford.

Daniel Lambert's tombstone in Stamford also still exists.

The local football club Stamford AFC is nicknamed "The Daniels" and thus refers directly to Daniel Lambert.

literature

  • Jan Bondeson: The Two-Headed Boy and other Medical Marvels . Ithaca, New York 2004, ISBN 0-8014-8958-X , pp. 237-260.

Web links

Commons : Daniel Lambert  - collection of images, videos and audio files