1880.] on Fashion in Deformity. 406 



Althougli tlic American luclians, living a healthy life in their 

 native wilds, and under physical conditions which cause all bodily 

 lesions to occasion far less constitutional or local disturbance than is 

 the case with people living under the artificial conditions, and tho 

 accumulated predisposition to disease which civilization entails, thus 

 aj^pcar to suffer little, if at all, from this unnatural treatment, it seems 

 to be otherwise with the French, on whom its effects have been 

 watched by medical observers more closely than it can have been on 

 the savages in America. " Dr. Foville proves, by positive and 

 numerous facts, that the most constant and the most frequent effects 

 of this deformation, though only carried to a small degree, are head- 

 aches, deafnesses, cerebral congestions, meningitis, cerebritis, and 

 epilepsy ; that idiocy or madness often terminates this series of evils, 

 and that the asylums for lunatics and imbeciles receive a large number 

 of their inmates from among these unhappy people." * For this cause 

 the French physicians have exerted all their influence, and with great 

 success, to introduce a more rational system in the districts where the 

 practice of compressing the heads of infants prevailed. 



I will now pass from the head to the extremities, and shall have 

 little to say about the hands, for the artificial deformities practised 

 upon those members, are confined to chopping off one or more of the 

 fingers, generally of the left hand, and usually not so much in 

 obedience merely to fashion, as part of an initiatory ceremony, or an 

 expiation or oblation to some superior, or to some departed person. 

 Such practices are common among the American Indians, some tribes 

 of Africans, the Australians, and Polynesians, especially those greatest 

 of all slaves of ceremonial, the Fijiaus, where the amputation of 

 fingers is demanded to a2)pease an angry chieftain, or voluntarily 

 performed on the occasion of the death of a relative as a token of 

 affection. 



On the other hand, the feet have suffered more, and altogether 

 with more serious results to general health and comfort, from simple 

 conformity to pernicious customs, than any other j^art of the body. 

 But on this subject, instead of relating the unaccountable caprices of 

 the savage, we have to speak only of people who have already 

 advanced to a tolerably high grade of civilization, and to include all 

 those who are at the present time foremost in the ranks of intellec- 

 tual culture. 



The most extreme instance of modification of the size and form of 

 the foot in obedience to fashion, is the well-known case of the Chinese 

 women, not entirely confined to tlie upper classes, but in some districts 

 pervading all grades of society alike. The deformity is produced by 

 applying tight bandages round the feet of the girls when about five 

 years old. The process is an extremely painful one, and its results are 

 not only an alteration in the relative position of the growing bones 



* Gosse, " Essai sur lea Deformations artificielle du Crane," ' Annales d'Hygi^ne 

 publique,' 2 ser. torn. iv. p. 8. 



