Some gain in flesh as life goes on is a frequent thing here as
elsewhere, and usually has no unwholesome meaning. Occasionally we see
people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once
unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and
around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty
degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery
flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do not pit on pressure.

Alcoholism also gives rise in some people to a vast increase of adipose
tissue, and the sodden, unwholesome fatness of the hard drinker is a
sufficiently well known and unpleasant spectacle. The overgrowth of
inert people who do not exercise enough to use up a healthy amount of
overfed tissues is common enough as an individual peculiarity, but there
are also two other conditions in which fat is apt to be accumulated to
an uncomfortable extent. Thus, in some cases of hysteria where the
patient lies abed owing to her belief that she is unable to move about,
she is apt in time to become enormously stout. This seems to me also to
be favored by the large use of morphia to which such women are prone, so
that I should say that long rest, the hysterical constitution, and the
accompanying resort to morphia make up a group of conditions highly
favorable to increase of fat.

Lastly, there is the class of fat anæmic people, usually women. This
double peculiarity is rather uncommon, but, as the mass of thin-blooded
persons are as a rule thin or losing flesh, there must be something
unusual in that anæmia which goes with gain in flesh.

Bauer[8] thinks that lessened number of blood-corpuscles gives rise to
storing of fat, owing to lessened tissue-combustion. At all events, the