p. 11 | TIGHT LACING

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 24, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 25.

TIGHT LACING.

REV. H. R. HAWEIS, of England, must have startled some of his fashionable hearers by the following denunciation of unwholesome fashions in dress:—

"When the door," he exclaimed, "closes on the light and splendor of the revel, the veil is drawn quickly across—the public are shut out; but the true physician, of souls as well as of bodies, will invite you to enter that gloomier apartment, and hear the stern verdict upon another which to-morrow may be pronounced on you—'Death from natural causes!' Lay no such flattering unction to your soul. 'Death from rut in the liver and corn on the heart, produced by tight lacing!' These are the very words of a leading physician of the day, to me. I plead for nothing impossible—for nothing which cannot be, and which is not accomplished every day by sensible women in the best circles. Many plead for the mitigation of a public eyesore, against which our present fashion of following the natural lines of the body, instead of creating false ones, protests as loudly as do the doctors themselves. I want you to be reasonable, and, knowing the terrors of the violated laws of nature, I pray to be persuasive; and this is the spirit in which I plead with you this morning against the evils of excessive compression in tight lacing—that systematic outrage upon the human skeleton, that fatal attack upon the sacred organs of circulation, respiration, and nutrition."

Almost every disease of the human body may be either occasioned or augmented by the wearing of corsets.