Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/198

186 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 compeers in their crusade against this foolish practice, and especially against it as it affects the female part of the community. The corset 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 suppressed, 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 fellow 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 permitted 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 mental constitutions by this one practice of cultivating, under an atrocious view of what is beautiful, a form of body which is destructive of development 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 adapted that it acts at one and the same time as belt and compressor general. The effect of either is to press down upon the liver and stomach, to prevent the free circulation of blood through these organs, to diminish their active physiological function, to make them descend and compress 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 upward, 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