THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



OCTOBER, 1880. 



FASHION IN DEFOKMITY * 



By WILLIAM HENEY FLOWEE, LL.D., F.B.S., 



HUNTERIAN PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY, ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF ENGLAND. 



I HAVE to ask your attention this evening to certain outward man- 

 ifestations of a propensity common to human nature in every 

 aspect in which we are acquainted with it the most primitive and 

 barbarous, and the most civilized and refined but one which is, as far 

 as I know, peculiar to human nature. 



I shall speak of deformity in the sense of alteration of the natural 

 form of any part of the body, and those cases of voluntary deformation 

 will be considered which are performed, not by isolated individuals, 

 or with special motives, but by considerable numbers of members of 

 a community in imitation of one another in fact, according to fashion, 

 " that most inexorable tyrant, to which the greater part of mankind 

 are willing slaves." 



Fashion is now often associated with change, but in more primi- 

 tive communities fashions of all sorts are more permanent than with 

 us ; and in all communities such fashions as those I am now speaking 

 of are, for obvious reasons, far less likely to be subject to the fluctua- 

 tions of caprice than those affecting the dress only, which, even in 

 Shakespeare's time, changed so often that "the fashion wears out 

 more apparel than the man." Alterations once made in the form of 

 the body can not be discarded or modified in the lifetime of the 

 individual, and therefore, as fashion is intrinsically imitative, such 

 alterations have the strongest possible tendency to be reproduced gen- 

 eration after generation. 



The origins of these fashions are mostly lost in obscurity, all 



* A discourse delivered at the Royal Institution, Friday, May 7, 18S0. 

 vol. xvii. 46 



