better health. Good corsets assist the physician in the effort to restore normal conditions, while the woman who never wears any but a good corset will escape many of the so-called inevitable ills, prolong her enjoyment of, and increase her usefulness in, life.
We are through for the present with the corset made with the avowed purpose of diminishing the waist to the smallest possible size, and also with that which was supposed to entirely obliterate the roundness of the abdomen, exaggerate the size of the hips and increase the curve of the spine. We have been struggling with that which was intended for the complete annihilation of women's hips. Why this was not as bad as the others is no fault of fashionable corset makers, but because it was a mechanical impossibility to make it so. With corsets made so small in proportion through the hips women could not get them on without increasing the size of the waist. So fashion made a virtue of necessity and created the mode of "large waists." These "flattening hip" corsets exert extreme pressure in lateral direction around the body-one zone of pressure at the base of the thorax around the floating ribs and another from about six inches below that around the hips extending as far down as possible and still permit the wearer to assume the sitting position; but at the point of release the flesh of the thighs often bulges out, giving most unpleasing outlines to the form. With this form of corset the rotary or lateral motion of the upper part of the body is almost impossible and women move stiffly, "all in one piece," as one writer puts it. The waist line is high and there is pressure upon the stomach. The flesh of the back is pushed up toward the shoulder blades. Extreme pressure exists from back to front at the base of the spine, all this throwing the body out of poise, flexing the knees, pushing the pelvis forward, causing the shoulders to droop and shortening the body in the front length from neck to diaphragm. Many women are from one-half to one inch shorter than their normal height with this very modish corset on.
The results of the fashionable stoop affected by the young women of today and encouraged by the corset which attempts to obliterate the hips, will be told by the next decade when those same young women reach maturer years and present another problem to the orthopedic specialist and the gynecologist. No sooner has the novelty of this new shape of woman worn off than we are informed by the creators of fashions that it will be fashionable for women to have rounded abdomens. and corsets, therefore, are being advertised which "curve inward over the diaphragm" and "round outward over the abdomen," and the young women who pose as fashion models upon whom the new styles of gowns are exhibited are even wearing a pad to simulate a prominence of the abdomen which has not yet been produced by the corset. This carries us back just one hundred
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