For around 10 years William Sheldon's theories on somatotype were taken seriously enough that the entire freshman classes of several Ivy league schools were photographed nude. This became scandalous enough by the mid-1970s that some of the photos were eventually destroyed, though many other repositories of these photographs survived well into the 1990s and were housed in archives at the Smithsonian.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html