The Heaviest Person Ever To Have Lived



The heaviest person in medical history was Jon Brower Minnoch, who had suffered from obesity since childhood. He was 6’1” tall and weighed 392 pounds in 1963, 700 pounds in 1966, and 975 pounds in 1976. In March 1978, Minnoch was admitted to University Hospital in Seattle, where consultant endocrinologist Dr. Robert Schwartz calculated that Minnoch must have weighed more than 1,400 pounds, a great deal of which was water accumulation due to congestive heart failure. In order to get Minnoch to the hospital, it took a dozen firemen and an improvised stretcher to move him from his home to a ferry boat. When he arrived at the hospital, saturated with fluid and suffering from heart and respiratory failure, he was put in two beds strapped together. It took 13 people just to roll him over to change the sheets. After nearly two years on a diet of 1,200 calories a day, Minnoch was discharged at 476 pounds. In October 1981, he had to be readmitted after putting on over 197 pounds. When he died at the age of 41 on September 10, 1983, he weighed more than 798 pounds.