In 1966, asked to describe the person least likely to develop atherosclerosis, Cambridge research fellow Alan N. Howard answered, “A hypotensive, bicycling, unemployed, hypo-beta-lipoproteinic, hyper-alpha-lipoproteinic, non-smoking, hypolipaemic, underweight, premenopausal female dwarf living in a crowded room on the island of Crete before 1925 and subsisting on a diet of uncoated cereals, safflower oil, and water.”

Oxford physician Alan Norton added that her male counterpart was an ectomorphic Bantu who worked as a London bus conductor, had spent the war in a Norwegian prison camp, never ate refined sugar, never drank coffee, always ate five or more small meals a day, and was taking large doses of estrogen to check the growth of his prostate cancer.

“All these phrases mark correlations established in the last few years in a field of medical research which, in volume at least, is unsurpassed,” noted Richard Mould in Mould’s Medical Anecdotes. “The conflict of evidence is unequalled as well.”