Fashion in deformity : [a discourse] / by W.H. Flower.

  • Flower, William Henry, 1831-1899.
Date:
[1880]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fashion in deformity : [a discourse] / by W.H. Flower. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    then see what a miserable, stiffened, distorted thing is this same foot, when it has been submitted for a number of years to the “ improving ” process to which our civilization condemns it. The toes all squeezed and flattened against each other; the great toe no longer in its normal position, but turned outwards, pressing so upon the others that one or more of them frequently has to find room for itself either above or under its fellows; the joints all rigid, the muscles atrophied and powerless; the finely formed arch broken down; everything which is beautiful and excellent in the human foot destroyed, to say nothing of the more serious evils which so generally follow—corns, bunions, in-growing nails, and all their attendant miseries. Now, the cause of all this will be perfectly obvious to anyone who compares the form of the natural foot with the last upon which the shoemaker makes the covering for that foot. This, in the words of Fig. 15. ABC A. Natural form of the sole of the Foot, the great toe parallel to the axis of the whole foot. B. The same, with outline of ordinary fashionable boot. C. The neces- sary modification of the form of the foot consequent upon wearing such a boot. the late Mr. Dowie, “ is shaped in front like a wedge, the thick part or instep rising in a ridge from the centre or middle toe, instead of the great toe, as in the foot, slanting off to both sides from the middle, terminating at each side and in front like a wedge; that for the inside or great toe being similar to that for the outside or little toe, as if the human foot had the great toe in the middle and a little toe at each side, like the foot of a goose! ” The great error in all boots and shoes made upon the system now in vogue in all parts of the civilized world lies in this method of construction upon a principle of bilateral symmetry. A straight line drawn along the sole from the middle of