Ripped Off

Among the bodybuilders Gavin Francis discusses in his essay from the October 22 issue of the Review, the most surprising is surely Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, who keeps in a drawer (along with his stash of pornographic postcards) a chart measuring his progress with “Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser,” a real device invented by the man who organized the first strongman competitions in Great Britain. (Bloom’s “biceps 9 in and 10 in” probably did not qualify.) The dream of getting shredded is not new, but the idea of breaking the body to build it back stronger has perhaps never been taken so literally as it is by today’s bodybuilders. From unregulated steroids that reduce lifespan to “looksmaxxing” exercises that require smashing one’s own bones, bodybuilding is suffering from “an epidemic of abuse,” Francis writes, “evolving into a public health emergency, quickened by digital culture.”Francis is a physician in Scotland who has seen the fallout from this abuse firsthand. Since 2014 he has written for the Review on public health subjects ranging from vaccine skepticism to mental health diagnoses and prostate cancer. His writing about medicine, Oliver Sacks, the NHS, and much ...