being some of the most common, and it is a frequent cause of sorrow and death to young married ladies.
Many ladies who are hoping to become mothers, either through ignorance and vanity, or through feelings of modesty which lead them to try to conceal their condition, so press in their bodies by tight, stiff stays, that their children cannot grow properly, and if they live to term are born weak, deformed, and crippled. But the very fact of tight-lacing will frequently prevent the possibility of motherhood, and it is a prevalent cause of miscarriage, falling of the womb, piles, and varicose veins, with other painful affections far too numerous to mention.
Only the physician can know the full amount of death, suffering, and mental anguish brought about by the state of affairs which I have attempted to describe, although incompletely, knowing as I do the popular horror of plain speaking, yet all this mischief is caused by a piece of vanity so apparently trifling as the desire to have a smaller waist than Nature has intended.
Can the pleasure of boasting a tiny waist be weighed in the balance of the mental and physical agony at the cost of which it is obtained? But ladies are too apt to avoid weighing the value of their pleasures in this manner. They follow the fashion, whatever it may be, quite blindly, and without endeavouring to adapt it to their own requirements, under a sort of tacit belief that "whatever is, is right;" and, if their conduct is ever
