SANITARY ASPECT OF DRESS

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3562, 8 December 1882, Page 4

SANITARY ASPECT OF DRESS

In a paper read at the Sanitary Congress at Newcastle lately on the " Sanitary aspect of dress," Dr. A. Carpenter characterised this field of sanitary work as one in which the Queen had comparatively little power, and Parliament none at all, but in which the Sanitary Institute might fairly lay claim to some authority, and should undoubtedly attempt to exert it. Sumptuary laws could not now be enacted, because the age had become too sensible to interfere in such matters, but they existed in our schools. Custom and fashion might be insanitary, but the votaries did not know it, and there was no school to teach them what was sanitary or insanitary a3 regarded dress. The Sanitary Institute should have a word to say in trying to influence public opinion, society, and fashion against some of the barbarous costumes which still continued to flourish and to bear fruit in a thousand different ways, which produced an immense amount of disease and misery amongst those who were scarcely aware of the mischief which they had brought upon themselves, or caused other people to suffer. Not one half of the people, for instance, had really natural feet. The good sense of the English nation was abolishing stays from the list of articles which young girls wore, but they were sadly too much worn even now, and health was sacrificed to ' figure,' because it was thought by some that a slim ■waist was a thing of beauty. The way, also, in which children were clothed and ligatured, often to their fatal injury, formed a very important subject for inquiry and improvement, as did the use of arsenic, antimony, and lead to color clothing stuffs and to render them heavy in weighing scales, and the ' dressing' of linens for the market with foreign and earthy matters. These and other matters he denounced as evincing a neglect of the laws of morality, and of the lines of true beauty and of correct sanitary principles in matters of dress, and justified him, he said, in asking the Congress to exert its influence in their correction.