The Corset in Victorian Medical Debate: 'Tight-Lacing' Condemned by The Lancet
Poets involved
What happened
During the 1860s and 1870s, Britain's leading medical journal The Lancet, published in London, ran an extended series of articles and letters condemning tight-lacing as a medical danger, cataloguing injuries including fractured ribs, displaced organs, restricted breathing, and miscarriage attributed to extreme corset use. The medical community's debate was widely covered in the popular press and contributed to the development of the Victorian health reform movement. Defenders of the corset argued in the same pages that it provided essential spinal support and was not inherently harmful.
Literary impact
The Lancet's medical debate on tight-lacing was closely followed by Victorian women writers who drew on its medical language to argue for bodily and social reform. The overlap between the rhetoric of medical constraint and social constraint became a rich metaphorical resource for poets including Augusta Webster and Amy Levy. George Eliot's novels, though prose, engaged with similar questions of women's bodily and intellectual repression that the medical corset debate articulated.
Source: Wikipedia
