The Corset and the Crinoline by W. B. Lord

Author:W. B. Lord
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486138404
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE CRINOLINE OF A SOUTH SEA ISLANDER.

Madame La Sante also refers to the custom as being much more general than is commonly supposed. She says—“Several instances of this system in private families have lately come to my own knowledge, and I am acquainted with more than one fashionable school in the neighbourhood of London where the practice is made a rule of the establishment. Such a method is doubtlessly resorted to from a sense of duty, and those girls who have been subjected to this discipline, and with whom I have had an opportunity of conversing, say that for the first few months the uneasiness by the continued compression was very considerable, but that after a time they became so accustomed to it that they felt reluctant to discontinue the practice.” In the United States of America the ladies often possess figures of remarkable slenderness and elegance, and the term “ illusion” is not unfrequently applied to a waist of more than ordinary taperness. In a great number of instances the custom above referred to would be found to have mainly contributed to its original formation. The way in which doctors disagree on matters relating to the corset question is most remarkable.

The older writers, as we have seen, launched out in the most sweeping and condemnatory manner against almost every article of becoming or attractive attire. Corsets were most furiously denounced, and had the qualities which were gravely attributed to them been one-thousandth part as deadly as they were represented, the civilised world would long ere this have been utterly depopulated. When we find such diseases and ailments as the following attributed by authors of supposed talent to the use of the corset, we are no longer surprised at remarks and strictures emanating from similar sources meeting with ridicule and derision: “ hooping-cough, obliquity of vision, polypus, apoplexy, stoppage of the nose, pains in the eyes, and earache” are all laid at the door of the stays. We are rather surprised that large ears and wooden legs were not added to the category, as they might have been with an equal show of reason. Medical writers of the present day are beginning to take a totally different view of the matter, as the following letter from a surgeon of much experience will show:—

“ My attention has just been directed to an interesting and important discussion in your magazine on the subject of corsets, and I have been urged as a medical man to give my opinion regarding them. Under these circumstances I trust you will allow me to attend the ‘ Englishwoman’s Conversazione’ for once, as medical men are supposed to be the great opponents of the corset. It is no doubt true that those medical men who studied for their profession some thirty or forty years ago are still prejudiced against this elegant article of female dress, for stays were very different things even then to what they are now. The medical works, too, which they studied were written years before, and spoke against the buckram and iron stays of the last century.

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