American physician and physical culture advocate Dr. Dio Lewis published a sustained medical and moral campaign against the corset from Boston, Massachusetts, arguing in lectures, pamphlets, and his book Gymastics for Ladies that tight lacing caused displacement of internal organs, respiratory disease, and shortened lives. His work was part of a broader American health reform movement that challenged the physical culture of Victorian femininity. Lewis helped establish physical education for women as both a medical and feminist cause.

The medical campaign against the corset provided poets and feminist essayists with a new, scientific vocabulary for their cultural critiques. Women's reform poetry of the 1870s and 1880s frequently deployed the language of health and natural bodies inherited from Lewis and his contemporaries. This discourse fed directly into the poetry of the New Woman writers of the 1890s, who treated bodily freedom as inseparable from intellectual and creative liberation.