TIGHT LACING.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2485, 24 March 1882, Page 3

TIGHT LACING.

Deaths from tight lacing have been of frequent occurrence for many years past, and a few more or lees, says the 11 Dancet,” can make no difference to the fashionable world. Dr. Dinford Thomas, the coroner for Central Middlesex, says he is personally cognisant of four or five euch painful sacrifices to an ideal conception of the human figure, which is totally at variance with fact and opposed to the laws of nature. In the most recent case of this class recorded an aged woman who died from syncope was found to have so compressed her body by tight lacing that the stomach was, as it were, divided into two portions, cne being thrust upwards so as te hamper the movements of the heart, whilst the other was forced downwards. It may bo alleged that the death of a woman at seventy years of fge cannot be held to be evidence against the urgent evils of the practice. We lay the greater stress on the case because it is closrly not available as evidence of urgency. It is rather significant as a proof of the injury which the human body will long endure without the extinction of life. It cannot be pretended that a stomach ought to be compressed as this poor woman’s had been. She lived on in spite of the maltreatment to which her figure was subjected in the interests of fashion. It cannot, therefore, be argued that, inasmuch as the deaths from tight lacing are not as numerous as they might be, no serious harm is done. It is evident that extreme violence may be used, and grave mischief may be done by tight lacing, even when the victims of this stupid and baneful practice are not killed outright. Many of the maladies to which women are subjected are the direct consequences of their habits, and the vagaries of dress and the artifices of the toilet are among the most pernicious. Although it is vain to argue with women, the facts must be stated, however little may be their influence on the female mini by vanity distraught.