Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/76

 scarcely credible that women, who wish to preserve either their health or their beauty, will deliberately continue to take so certain a means of destroying both as this compression of the waist.

If support is what is needed, a light steel brace is infinitely preferable, more cleanly, more durable, and more healthful. Excellent ones can be bought in all our large cities. If it is desired to reduce an exuberant form, we have already laid down the rules for that. If the object is to "make up the figure," those have the best success who, like the Italian ladies, depend on the arrangement of the dress and a careful carriage, and not on forcing the body into unnatural positions.

There has been said so much on this topic by physicians that it is probably a tiresome one to readers. Perhaps they are ready to paraphrase Shakespeare and exclaim against the doctors as "fellows of iteration." We make our attack on the custom from a new quarter, and in the interests of beauty itself demand that respect be paid to fundamental laws of health. Unless we are implicitly obeyed here, we cannot keep our promise that our readers shall remain beautiful longer than they are young.