Erroneously high values for the birth weight of newborn infants were given by many eminent physicians as late as the middle of the last century.1
Writing in 1825, Dr. James Kennedy of Glasgow states:
Some new-born children have been known to be sixteell:almost all the individuals of two large families were more than fifteen;my own experience has furnished me with examples of two infants who were nineteen, one who was twenty, and another who had two teeth and was twenty-two pounds, at the time of their passing from the foetal state.Such facts are curious:they may afterwards come to be useful illustrations of the natural history of man.2