QI The Book of the Dead

cities such as Birmingham, Cambridge and York, as well as twicereturning to London. But the constant travelling took a toll on his health and he started to make plans for his retirement. In September 1809, he returned to Stamford in Lincolnshire for what would be his last residency. He loved the Stamford race meeting and in the times when he was merely huge rather than vast, he had enjoyed laying bets in the town’s many pubs that, given a small head start, he could win a race from one end of Stamford to the other. The town was a maze of narrow alleys, and he knew that, once he got ahead of people, he could literally block their passage and they would never be able to get past him.
    As he could no longer climb stairs, he had taken a room on the ground floor of the Wagon and Horses inn and sent a droll note to the Stamford Mercury asking them to send someone to take an order for printed handbills announcing his arrival: ‘As the mountain could not wait on Mahomet, Mahomet would go to the mountain.’ The printer came and though Lambert complained of being tired, he seemed full of enthusiasm for his appointments the next day. The following morning he was about to shave when he complained to the landlord that he was finding breathing difficult. Ten minutes later he was dead. There was no autopsy but the likelihood is that he suffered a massive blood clot to his lungs. Two days later he was buried, the Mercury commenting that ‘his remains had been kept quite as long as was prudent’.
    Burying Lambert was a feat of engineering. It took 112 feet of elm wood to construct his gargantuan square coffin and the entire wall of his hotel room had to be dismantled to get him out. The coffin was fitted with axles and wheeled slowly down towards the church, where a huge crowd had gathered. It took twenty men half an hour to lower Daniel Lambert into the grave. His friends paid for a memorial that carried this affectionate epitaph:

    In Remembrance of that PRODIGY in NATURE DANIEL LAMBERT a native of LEICESTER who was possessed of an exalted and convivial Mind and, in personal Greatness had no COMPETITOR
     
    It is a fitting tribute to a decent man. The famous Leicestershire horse-trainer Dick Christian remarked that Lambert ‘was a cheery man in company but shyish of being looked at’. By pure force of character he had overcome his shyness, and the shame and discomfort of his size, to become a national hero. Today, the local tourist office proudly bills him as ‘Leicester’s largest son’.

     
    The relaxed jollity that Daniel Lambert managed throughout his short life would elude Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) until the very end of hers. Most people now have an inkling that the ‘ministering angel’ or ‘Lady with the Lamp’ image hides a more complex reality, but it still comes as a shock to learn that she spent more than half her life not as a nurse but as an invalid, much of it bedridden in her Mayfair flat.
    The precise nature of this illness has been the cause of much speculation. She did her best to keep up appearances and would, on most days, get washed and dressed before retiring to the bed again, ready to receive a maximum of one visitor a day, if strictly necessary. But she also kept herself manically busy. Perpetually armed with a pen and writing paper, she produced books, papers and a stream of correspondence with her family and famous friends, starting her working day as early as 5 a.m. In her life, she wrote more than 14,000 letters, although many of the most personal ones she marked ‘Private. Burn.’ Most of what we nowassociate with her – the foundation of modern nursing practice and improved standards of hygiene – were products of her years in bed rather than her brief stay in the Crimea. In the century since her death, biographers and historians have variously accused her of malingering, of strategic invalidism in order to manipulate others, of hypochondria and even neurotic lesbianism. More charitably, she has also been retrospectively diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, manic depression, schizophrenia (because she claimed to hear God’s voice) and chronic fatigue syndrome.
    The medical evidence all points to the fact that she was properly ill. Her physical symptoms are consistent with the bacterial infection we now call brucellosis (then known as Crimea or Mediterranean fever), which she probably picked up by drinking unpasteurised milk while working in the military hospital