TOLERATION OF THE CORSET: PRESCRIBING WHERE ONE CANNOT PROSCRIBE.[1]
BY
ROBERT L. DICKINSON, M. D.,
Gynecologist, Brooklyn Hospital; Obstetrician-in-Chief, to the Methodist
Episcopal Hospital, Brooklyn, New York.
(With illustrations.)
Toward the question of waist constriction one of three attitudes may be taken. First, hostility, intolerance. Second, helplessness, surrender to inevitable fashion, cynical indifference. Third, an opportunism that does the best it can, insistently remonstrant in harmful cases, wasting no time on neutral cases, and taking one's small part in the slow campaign of education looking toward developed habits of exercise, appreciation of normal body forms, and true taste in dress.
In actual practice the matter goes largely by default. We give vague warnings or prohibitions that are temporary and futile. Merely to order a corset" loosened" when it may be of vicious design, is like telling a chronic colitic no more than to be careful of his diet. As the woman with a toppling uterus cannot go wrapper-clad the gynecologist has to see that she is provided with some definite dress adjustment. Whether this turns out to be help or only lessened hurt, it is manifestly our duty to select, direct, or control these means. Surgery is often the easiest portion of our service. A study of details and individual adaptation in these matters wherein our efforts are met with smile or sneer or subterfuge we naturally shirk.
The fillip to our sagging or cynical spirits was given by what might be called the one recent piece of dispassionate and scientific writing on the subject, a combined study by gynecologist and orthopedist, by Reynolds and Lovett of Boston. Confining themselves to backache and posture problems, each put his
- ↑ Read in Abstract before New York Obstetrical Society, November, 1910.
