Tight Lacing, with Its Injurious Tendencies

In one of the late numbers you call for facts, whether communicated in elegant language or not. I have recently learned one to which I give all possible publicity, and have told it in almost every circle of the young in which I have since found myself. Two weeks since, while on a visit to a respectable, long experienced physician in one of the southern boundary towns of New Hampshire, he gave me in substance the following account, as near as I can recollect.

He was called a week or two previous to visit a young female, I think not over twenty years of age, who was distressingly ill of a complaint of the lungs laboring under a great difficulty of breathing, which his discrimination led him at once to impute to a long continued practice of tight lacing-a practice which is slaying its thousands and tens of thousands in our enlightened land. There was, in his opinion, an adhesion of the lungs to the chest, and a consequent inflammation which had proceeded to such a height that death was inevitable. Little or nothing could be done. The poor girl after a few days of acute suffering, fell a victim to-(what shall I say? I am unwilling to wound the feelings of her friends,) her own folly and vanity. It could not be suicide, because no such result was contemplated, though the deed was done by her own hand. We can call it by no safer name than self-slaughter, for such even an external examination of the body proved it to have been.

The shoulder blades were found to be literally lapped one over the the other; the false ribs had been so compressed that the space of only about an inch and a half remained between them; and so great was the curvature of the spine which had been girdled in by the cords of death, that after the corpse was laid out for interment, two pillows were put under the arch thereby formed, while the shoulders rested on the board. She was a large healthy person, and was ignorantly led by the desire to please, to sacrafice [sacrifice] her life at the shrine of fashion, and the prevailing false ideas of beauty of form. She was said to be of amiable disposition and correct moral habits otherwise.

My own mind was so impressed with the recitle [recital] of this story, that I could hardly forbear weeping over the folly, and wickedness, and ignorance of my sex. I inwardly wished the ability to ring it in the ears of every female in the land, until their voluntarily assumed "strait jackets," that indicate nothing better than mental aberration in the weavers, should be voluntarily thrown aside.