DEATH-DEALING DRESS

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIV, Issue 18, 21 January 1903, Page 11 (Supplement)

DEATH-DEALING DRESS

FASHIONS THAT RUIN HEALTH AND CAUSE DEFORMITY.

The highest ambition of probably sixty per cent, of the women of this or * any other country is to look well and dress well. It is doubtless, therefore, if any crusade against fashions that are ruinous to health will ever prove entirely successful. A feature of the "Medical, Surgical and Pathological Reports" of the Royal Southern Hospital may send a shudder through the frames of many fashionable women.

In "a glimpse at some of the deformities and diseases of women due to their clothing," Dr. W. Williams attributes the worst cases of anaemia and other ailments of a more serious character to tight-lacing and tight costumes, and says that most fashionable young women are without healthy blood or digestion from the age of sixteen to twenty-four or thirty. The largely-prevailing practice is to push the stomach into an out-of-the-way corner, and the liver, or some other equally ignored organ, into the stomach.

It is a custom in England, the writer says, for the young women to have the natural development of their waists, chests, breasts and backs

diverted into deformity, with muscular and glandular atrophy also, at an early age. A woman grows "older" sooner than a man, because, in the majority of cases, she is permanently deformed as to her skeleton at twenty-four, and permanently crippled as to her muscular system by the time she is thirty. Where women lead healthy, active lives, as they do in the colliery districts, they are fine, well developed individuals, and many of them are far more powerful than the average man.