A Practical Treatise on Rupture (Electronic book text)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHEST DEFORMED BY STAYS. Diagram No. 6.* OT textit{61 '.. Yet these are not the days when ignorance can be pleaded as an excuse for such wrong- headed folly and wickedness; it is obvious that the stay is an appurtenance of woman only when she has arrived at a state of full development; but then it should be divested of all the apparatus of busks and bones that frequently encumber it, and its main bearing * The chest distorted from the abuse of stays. If this figure be compared with the preceding, the effects of pressure will be seen at once. The figure is drawn from a chest in my possession. The letters a a refer to a dotted line, indicating the position of the midriff. How miserably the space allotted to the liver and stomach is curtailed ! 38 INJURIOUS EFFECTS OF STAYS. should be limited to the upper half of the chest. The stay is, in reality, a support for the bust; such is its purpose, such alone its intention. How very ludicrous it would appear to put it on boys; and yet boys have as much need of it as girls up to the period of womanhood, and, I may say further, up to the period of marriage. But as stays form a staple article of female dress in this country, it may be well to point out their physiological action on the frame. It is well known that the upper half of the trunk of the body, the textit{chest, as it is properly termed, is constructed of a framework of twelve narrow bones, the ribs, which bend round from the spine behind to the breast-bone in front. These bones constitute the defence of the chief organs of the body, namely, the heart, the lungs, the liver, and the stomach, the two former being above, the two latter below. Upon these bones are spread out certain muscles of respiration and the muscles which support the spine, and the muscles are covered in by a lay...