Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/756

736 with people living under the artificial conditions and the accummulated predisposition to disease which civilization entails, thus appear 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 headaches, 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 practiced 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 Feejeeans, where the amputation of fingers is demanded to appease 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 part 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 intellectual 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 the 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 and other structures, but an arrest of their development, so that they remain permanently in a stunted or atrophied condition. The alterations of form consist in two distinct processes: 1. Bending the four