Robert Pershing Wadlow, born in Alton, Illinois in 1918, remains the tallest person ever recorded in medical history at 8 feet 11.1 inches. His unchecked growth was caused by hypertrophy of the pituitary gland, diagnosed by age 12, and his parents declined the era's dangerous experimental surgery, choosing instead to give him the most normal childhood possible under increasingly surreal circumstances.

This episode looks past the staggering statistics to the human story: a young man who insisted on his own dignity. We follow him from a custom classroom desk and high school hobbies to touring with the Ringling Brothers Circus and serving as an ambassador for the International Shoe Company, always on his own terms, and to his early death at 22 from an infected blister he could not feel.

• Carrying his father up the stairs at age nine  ...