186 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



has given way for a short time, but it seems always to have fallen 

 back again and resumed its place. 



For my part, I can do no more than earnestly follow my predecessors 

 and conrpeers in their crusade against this foolish practice, and espe- 

 cially against it as it affects the female part of the community. The cor- 

 set and the waist-belt I must once more condemn as opposed to all that is 

 healthful and all that is beautiful. By these appliances, through which 

 an unequal pressure is exerted on one part of the body, the functions of 

 the lungs, of the heart, and of the digestive organs are all kept under 

 imperfect condition. The breathing is suppressed, the heart-beat is sup- 

 pressed, the digestive power is suppressed. In this way the tripod of life 

 for life rests on the digestion, the respiration, and circulation is made 

 imperfect, and with that imperfection every other part of the body 

 sympathizes. Of late years women have raised the cry, and I think 

 quite properly, that they are too much subjected to the will of men, 

 that they have not the privileges which should belong to them as fel- 

 low human beings. But, in fact, no subjection to which they have 

 ever submitted can be greater than this to which they have subjected 

 themselves, and I would venture to say that, while they continue this 

 self-infliction, they can never, under any improved system of social 

 freedom, experience the benefit of the change. If, to-morrow, women 

 were placed in all respects on an equality with men, if they were per- 

 mitted to sit in Parliament, enter the jury-box, or ascend the Bench 

 itself, they would remain under subjection to superior mental and 

 physical force so long as they crippled their physical, vital, and men- 

 tal constitutions by this one practice of cultivating, under an atrocious 

 view of what is beautiful, a form of body which is destructive of de- 

 velopment of body, which reduces physical power, and which thereby 

 deadens mental capability. 



Of the two evil practices to which I refer, the tight waist-belt is, I 

 think, worse than the tight corset, except where the corset is so adapt- 

 ed that it acts at one and the same time as belt and compressor gen- 

 eral. The effect of either is to press down upon the liver and stomach, 

 to prevent the free circulation of blood through these organs, to dimin- 

 ish their active physiological function, to make them descend and com- 

 press the vital organs that lie beneath them, and so to impair the growth 

 and action of all the great secreting structures. The effect, again, is 

 to interfere with the great breathing-muscle, the diaphragm or midriff, 

 which divides the chest from the abdomen, and which, by its descent, 

 causes the lungs to fill in breathing. Lastly, the effect is to press up- 

 ward, and so to interfere with the heart and lungs themselves. An 

 eminent Parisian physician, M. Breschet, recorded many years ago the 

 facts relating to a woman who, on the right side, of her throat, had a 

 swelling which reached from the collar-bone to the level of the thyroid 

 cartilage, and which, when the chest was tightly laced in corsets, was 

 enlarged to its fullest. In this swelling the murmur of respiration 



