On the Sudermark Tables of Human Measure

The largest collection of Human bodily measurements yet assembled is cited in comparative physiology with a confidence which increases, I have observed, with the distance between the citing scholar and the original volumes. Professor Stannard has extracted from it the dimensions of the average Human chest. Merrow employs it to establish the relative burden-bearing capacities of Humans and Dwarves. Both gentlemen have overlooked the instructions printed inside the first cover, where the examining officer is directed to enter only those subjects provisionally accepted for pack service. I wanted the complete tables sufficiently to endure eleven months of correspondence with the Sudermarkish Ministry of Supply. Having obtained them, I find that their most frequently quoted conclusions could have been prevented by reading one page.

The tables comprise measurements of rather more than two million examinations, extending from Sudermark’s first great expansion of its factories through the exhaustion of its northern campaigns. Examinations must be distinguished from persons: a recruit transferred between depots might appear twice, and men returned from hospital were measured again under fresh numbers. The compiler’s celebrated total consequently includes an unknown quantity of repetition. Admission depended upon an earlier inspection, for which almost no measurements survive. The visibly infirm were excluded, as were those judged too small, too old, or otherwise unpromising; the district officers enjoyed considerable latitude in deciding what unpromising meant. Women appear chiefly in a separate schedule of depot labour, itself subject to different admission rules. From these successive selections my colleagues have contrived to manufacture Humanity.

I laid the first six volumes before Stannard at the Collegium and asked him to identify the column containing rejected applicants. He replied that the magnitude of the collection must compensate for occasional omissions. I asked whether two million measurements of tall men would eventually tell us the height of a short woman. He accused me of choosing an extravagant example, which was the first accurate criticism he had made that afternoon. The example was extravagant because the error was elementary. Nor can we repair it by assigning mathematical allowances to the missing people: we possess neither their dimensions nor a dependable account of their number. These records are useless for the racial comparisons now founded upon them, and their precision within individual entries does nothing to restore the population removed before measurement began.

The instructions become more revealing as one proceeds. The earliest require a balance, a measuring rod and a sack of graduated ballast. Later editions prescribe a walking circuit, a minimum pace and repeated loading until the examiner observes failure. Water allowances diminish between editions, although the grounds for the alteration are never supplied. A marginal ruling forbids counting a man’s collapse as failure of the trial if he resumes after being raised. I initially supposed the phrase referred to assistance from a seat. Mistress Edda Ruhl, a Sudermarkish machinist whom I had engaged to interpret the technical vocabulary, corrected me. The verb meant being lifted from the ground. I disputed her reading until she produced the same expression in a foundry accident regulation. My command of the language had been adequate to correspondence and wholly inadequate to protecting me from a conclusion I disliked.

One can follow the enlargement of the state’s machinery through the forms. District returns acquire columns for delivery to railheads; pack weights are keyed to numbered equipment patterns; the depot schedules begin to distinguish shifts. A telegraphic code reduces a rejected consignment of men to the same brief transmission used for defective harness, with a different terminal numeral. After Drenne is annexed, its districts enter under replacement designations. The mineral country farther north appears first as a source of ballast iron, then as a set of recruiting offices. There are no descriptions of engagements; there are requisitions for additional scales, complaints that local rods disagree with the capital’s standard, and an instruction to continue examinations in buildings whose heating fuel has been reassigned. Sudermark equipped itself to collect bodies, measure them and deliver the accepted proportion to a destination.

Ruhl understood this machinery more readily than I did. A discrepancy between the issue and return columns persuaded me that certain depots were concealing deaths. She pointed out that the same discrepancy could arise from transfers recorded in the receiving depot alone. I objected that the ministry’s system was too elaborate to permit so gross an ambiguity. She had spent nineteen years maintaining machines purchased by that ministry, and received this argument with an expression I deserved. We traced a surviving batch across three volumes and found that she was correct. Elsewhere deaths are explicitly entered, including deaths during examination, and require no assistance from my suspicions. I record the correction because disgust is perfectly capable of producing bad scholarship, even when its occasion is sound.

There is useful work to be done with the collection, provided we keep our claims within its boundaries. Matched entries may show how particular accepted men altered during service. Changes in harness pattern can sometimes be compared with recorded injuries, though differences in reporting must first be examined. The relation between repeated loading and subsequent incapacity deserves investigation, especially where the same examiner served for several years. I have applied for funds to employ Ruhl and two clerks upon such a study. The committee suggested that the existing averages would answer most practical questions at substantially less expense. I returned its memorandum with the admission instructions attached. As these occupied a single page, I ventured to hope that economy might at last favour their being read.

I have also required that our copies retain the names wherever names survive. A number is convenient for calculation, and we shall use numbers freely; the original identifiers nevertheless allow duplicate entries to be detected and individual histories to be recovered. Some men appear only once, accepted beneath a load they could sustain for the prescribed circuit, with nothing to tell us what followed. Others return lighter, are assigned a reduced burden, and disappear after a further examination. I want these figures. I intend to extract every defensible fact they contain. That intention obliges me to describe the procedure which produced them, including what was done to the people whose compliance furnished the data. A scholar who borrows the ministry’s totals while discarding its instructions has accepted an unusually poor bargain, and ought to cease recommending it to his readers.