Adolph Quetelet (1796-1874) was a Belgian statistician, and famously envisioned l'homme moyen—an image of the average man developed through the measurement of human features with the deviation plotted around the mean. He started with human physical features, like the chests of Scottish Highland regiment soldiers, and moved on to moral and intellectual qualities including suicide, crime, madness, and even poetic ability.

For Quetelet, the average body presented an ideal beauty; the normal, conceived of average, emerged as an ideal type to be desired. It was Quetelet that formulated the BMI, initially through the measurement of typical weights among French and Scottish conscripts. Instead of labelling the peak of the bell-curve as merely normal, he labelled it ‘ideal’, with those deviating either ‘overweight’ or ‘underweight’ instead of heavier than average or lighter than average. Thus, while informed by statistics, Quetelet was still working within the medical context of the normal; that is, he envisioned the normal (i.e., typical) as the ideal or something desirable.

It was Galton who, while building upon Quetelet’s notion of the ‘average man (a product of measurement and statistics), effected an important twist: instead of positing the normal as healthy and desirable, Galton equated the normal with the mediocre. Within this tradition the normal state is to be transcended, improved upon, and overcome.

-Erna Kubergovic

• Bulmer, M. (2004). Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry. Baltimore: JHU Press.

• Adolphe Quetelet. (2015). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/487148/Adolphe-Quetelet

• Eknoyan, G. (2007). Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874)- the average man and indices of obesity. Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, 23(1), 47-51.