What did happen to Elsie Scheel, the “perfect” woman mentioned in an article in Wednesday’s New York Times that described how people considered overweight had a slightly lower risk of dying than those of normal weight?
A century ago, at age 24, Miss Scheel was the subject of a spate of news media coverage after the “medical examiner of the 400 ‘co-eds’ ” at her college, Cornell University, described her as the epitome of “perfect health,” according to a 1912 New York Times article. That article and others also gave her dimensions: 5 foot 7 and 171 pounds, which would have corresponded to a body mass index of 27, putting Miss Scheel in the overweight category. Miss Scheel, it turns out, lived a long life, dying in 1979 in St. Cloud, Fla., three days shy of her 91st birthday.
But though it may be tempting to conclude that Miss Scheel’s longevity exemplifies the benefits of a not-too-low B.M.I, her case is only one anecdote, of course. And, according to family members and to hints provided in early articles, she was a person who valued being active and athletic, had a strong and confident attitude, and, as a daughter of a doctor and a mother of a doctor, may have been steeped in healthy habits that were much more relevant to her survival than her weight.
“She never took an aspirin or a Tylenol,” a granddaughter, Karen Hirsh Meredith, of Broken Arrow, Okla., said in an interview Wednesday. She kept up hobbies like stamp collecting and wrote pieces for the St. Cloud newspaper. And, Ms. Meredith said, “she was still driving late in life.”
Ms. Meredith said she did not recall her grandmother having any illnesses or being hospitalized except for shortly before she died, when she went into the hospital with stomach pain. She ended up having surgery for a perforated bowel and died the next day, Ms. Meredith said.
A death notice said Miss Scheel, who was Mrs. Hirsh when she died, had been a “practical nurse,” although Ms. Meredith said the family believed she did not work after she had children. In 1918 she married Frederick Rudolph Hirsh, an architect who supervised the building of the New York Public Library and who was a widower with two children, Frederick Jr. and Mary. He died in 1933 at 68, leaving his wife to raise a son, John, and a daughter, Elise. She moved to Florida from Mount Vernon, N.Y., in the 1940s and never remarried.
Miss Scheel’s mother, Sophie Bade Scheel, a physician educated at New York Medical College, maintained an active medical practice at a time when relatively few women did. And Miss Scheel may have benefited from good genes: her three siblings were 79, 88 and 93 when they died.
Published reports from 1912 and 1913 provide glimpses of the type of person Miss Scheel was and of her immediate-post-“perfect” experience.
She participated in many sports, playing basketball at Cornell. “I play a guard, where my weight helps,” she told a newspaper. She was a suffragette and, the Times article said, “doesn’t know what fear is.”
She ate only three meals every two days, loved beefsteak and shunned candy and caffeine. An article in The Oregonian asked her about her advice for healthy living, reporting that “Miss Scheel feels that the average girl does too much of the wrong sort of thing — too many dances and not enough good bracing tramps. I just got back from a 25-mile tramp to Enfield Falls.”
Some of the news media coverage was catty, even brutal. And it was extremely detailed. Her particulars — the size of her chest, waist and hips — were compared to the Venus de Milo.
A day after the Times article, The New York Herald ran a story about Miss Scheel above the fold on its front page: “Brooklyn Venus Much Too Large is Verdict of Physical Culturists.” These “physical culturists” claimed that Miss Scheel’s weight and height “cannot be reconciled with the accepted ideal of female beauty.”
One expert, a gymnasium owner, pronounced that “her chest measurement is small for the weight she is credited with; she is too tall to be considered an ideal type and her weight itself is all out of proportion.”
An article published in The Duluth News-Tribune said: “Miss Scheel looked as if she weighed 195 pounds. ‘Only 171,’ corrected she.”
Another article, published in The Oregonian and elsewhere, even included two sketches of nude figures and their anatomical 411. The Venus de Milo was 33-26-38, it said. “The Cornell Venus” was 34.6-30.3-40.
“Milo’s lady, as we know, is minus both arms and a foot, while Miss Scheel is decidedly ‘all there,’ ” the article pointed out.
But Miss Scheel seemed to handle the attention with modesty and confidence.
“Well if all they say about me is true, I can’t help it, for, like Topsy, ‘I just grew,’ ” she said in one 1912 article, speaking from Passaic, N.J., where her parents had recently moved. She was blunt: “Jersey can have no credit for any of my health, for I lived in New York and then in Brooklyn before we moved here a little while ago.”
And, to add insult to Jersey injury: “I’m going to experiment in horticulture here next summer. The place needs it, as you can see.”
Her story received worldwide attention and other women, including a Marjorie Watson in London, made claims to being closer to Venus than Miss Scheel.
And less than six months after her burst of publicity, The Springfield Daily News ran an article headlined “Perfect Woman Not Happy.” Miss Scheel, then working on her father’s farm in Sayville on Long Island, was finding perfection “not all it’s cracked up to be,” the article said. “All the neighbors have been asking about those famous physical measurements. The kids want to know the size of her feet when she walks downtown, the village mashers make bucolic and ponderous jests as she passes by, and the other girls, well, they just sniff and demand of each other ‘where on earth anybody can see anything beautiful about a figure like that?’ ”
Miss Scheel told the paper she was moving back to the Garden State, to “some unknown section of New Jersey.”
Over all, though, Miss Scheel seemed to have the self-esteem to cope with the dubiously desirable label of perfection.
In the Oregonian article, she said she would not have agreed to the publicity “if I had not been told that it might do other girls a great deal of good to know that it was possible to be absolutely strong and healthy. I am perfectly sound, and I have never been sick in my life.”