“Nature has endowed the feminine body with a most beautiful outline. It is almost incomprehensible that the ideal of beauty should during so lengthy a period aim at the destruction of this wonderful and unique perfection. The corset makes an ugly bend in the vertebral column, it makes the hip shapeless, it suggests an unnatural and even repulsive development of the breasts, which transforms our sentiment of the sacred beauty of the human body into the lowest sexual and perverse impulses. That the corset does _not_ really make the body appear slender is no longer open to doubt. All the suggested advantages of the corset are prejudices.... It is only when women’s dress is freed from the tyranny of this detestable corset that it will be able to develop in a free and artistic manner.”[111] Physicians are unanimous regarding the unhygienic nature of the corset. The deleterious influence of tight-lacing upon the form and the activity of the thoracic and abdominal organs has been thoroughly elucidated by many authors. I need refer only, among many, to the writings of Hugo Klein,[112] Menge,[113] and O. Rosenbach,[114] regarding the dangers of the corset. The corset hinders the sufficient inspiration, which is so necessary for the adequate activity of the respiratory and circulatory organs, and herein we find a principal cause of anæmia (O. Rosenbach); it exercises the most harmful pressure on the abdominal organs, especially on the stomach and the liver, and presses them out of their natural situation, so that it gives rise to a descent of the kidneys, the liver, and the genital organs. The extremely ugly “pendulous belly” is also dependent on the influence of the corset. The pressure of the corset also often gives rise to an atrophy of the mammary glands, and to abnormal changes in the nipples. Thence ensues, further, a serious hindrance to the function of lactation, which may indeed be rendered completely impossible. For this reason, Georg Hirth, in his admirable essay upon the indispensable character of the maternal breast, exclaims: “Away with the corset!”[115]