venture to give a short description of those parts of the body which are affected by the wearing of tight corsets; for I firmly believe that if women were more familiar with the construction of their own bodies, they would shrink with horror from the sins that they are now ignorantly committing against their own health and happiness. I would fain diminish the number of those cases where, if a coroner's jury were empanelled on the fair victims, the only true verdict possible would be "Died of tight stays."
When we know the number and size of the organs contained in the thorax and abdomen, one of the thoughts that naturally arises is, how marvellously all these organs are arranged, so that all can lie in so small a space. There is no waste room in the body, and every inch of space is fully occupied. Hence, if that space is diminished by pressure from the outside, it is evident that overcrowding, with all its attendant evils, must take place.
The thorax, or cavity of the chest, is divided from the abdomen by a thick muscular partition called the diaphragm. (See Plates 3 and 4.) The chest cavity contains the lungs, which extend from beneath the collar-bones low down on each side of the body to the bottom of the true ribs; the heart, which is the size of the owner's clenched fist; the large vessels connected with it, which pass down through the diaphragm to the lower part of the body, and the oesophagus or gullet, a muscular tube also passing through the diaphragm to the stomach,
