Such an examination, as it happens, and as it is usually undertaken,
serves only to show a moderately advanced degree of this deformity,
indeed, just so much as induces a patient to go to a doctor for relief
of pain or obvious deformity. This is wholly insufficient for the study
of a defect which in the various degrees of its development affects
nearly 90 per cent. of all youngish women so far observed and noted.
The doctors may--or may not--cure this evil, but they are not likely
to find time even to discover during their strenuous lives, the great
spread of this physical defect. But the merciful ukases of fashion,
from Paris or elsewhere, and the obvious benefits, for once, of a
fashion, are so powerful that the short skirt has remained with us for
several years past and does not seem likely to go. I can only hope it
will last until women who lead their sex in these days become ashamed
of the feet of their sisters and their own, and make a forcible attack
upon the Health Minister or Minister of Education, or both, so that
systematic foot-drill in all elementary schools may be established.
No other means than this, added to improved general health, can be
conceived as able to correct so widely spread a deformity. I do not
desire to be considered as making an attack on the bodily charms of
women, for whose multifarious attractions I yield to none in sincere
regard. But here is the revelation, here are the cases walking
unashamed before us, and if the skirts _should_ lengthen again and
cruelly hide up the evil, no one will be induced again to take up the
unpopular attitude of saying that nearly all young women have feet that
are deformed and ugly and, therefore, more or less inefficient. There
is, alas! only too much reason to know that the evil is great among the
better class, even of boys, for in 1919 Captain Coote said publicly at
a Schoolmasters’ Conference that fully 30 per cent. of the new boys
entering leading public schools had flat-foot, and Captain Coote, the
highest exponent of physical training in the Navy, knows a flat-foot
when he sees it. The measures here suggested in connection with the
feet of women have the great merit that from them boys and girls will
alike benefit.
Non-Arboreal Man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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