HORRORS OF TIGHT-LACING.-SURGICAL INVESTIGATION.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3209, 11 October 1881, Page 4

HORRORS OF TIGHT-LACING.-SURGICAL INVESTIGATION.

The Coroner for Central Middlesex has. hell an inquest at Kilburn on the body of a ■widow lady 48 years of age, whose sudden and premature death neerns almost doubtless to have been hastened by the senseless and pernicious practice of tight-lacing. The medical gentleman who had charge of the case stated that he made a post mortem examination of the body, and that he found the stomach was contracted in the centre by a 'rigid band narrowing the organ to oneeighth, of its normal dimensions, so that <T, ere were virtually two stomachs ; and this contra '"^ on was on a l evp l with a deep inMention on c ™P ondin g {° Y he ™ the stays were heed round the body. He further said v> fc fc J° !•!«• ™ flattened out and driven d( *P down mto the pelvic or abdominal region ; Pnd result the 'surgeon declared, without hesitation *° have been produced by tight-lacing. The. 1 * 6 is unfortunately, too much reason to fear, that English-women in general, and ladies of fashion in particular, will not pay the slightest regard to the Kilburn tight-lacing ease, or to the other instances of waist strangulation to which the worthy Coroner alluded. Indeed, we may expect to be told that it is highly indecorous to speafc in public of the anatomy of the female form, and that even, as according to the dictum of a punctilious Chamberlain, the Queen of | Spain had no les«, so an English Isdy of the pxisting decade of the 19th century Taas no stomnoh, no livpr and no abodomen. It would be deeply distressing to us, under sny circMirrntanoes. to offend against the law of decorum j still, the sex, young, middle-aped, and old, ought to be told in the most emphatic terms, that they poseese, not only the offfftns to which we have aluded, but lungs and henrta to boot, and that they are doing their best to disturb the aotions of those oraans, nnd ultimately to imperil their health in the highest degree, when they persist In excessive tight-lacing.—Rnglish Papey.