Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  Nursing corset.

  People sometimes ask me about what women accustomed to wearing corsets did during pregnancy. I have never been pregnant myself, so this is always a somewhat awkward question to answer. Truly, the only woman who could give a fully authoritative response would be one with direct personal experience—and that’s not me. I generally refer people to the past existence of maternity corsets, which had extra lacings in various places that could be let out as the fetus grew while maintaining the back support that becomes even more important as a woman’s figure takes on the dramatic increase in weight that accompanies a pregnancy. (A particularly common complaint I’ve heard from pregnant women is how much their lower backs ache. One of the pregnancy massage techniques we learned in massage school was the incredibly simple move of standing behind a pregnant woman, cradling her belly, then lifting up slightly so that the massage practitioner is holding the weight for a moment and the client’s back gets a brief respite. Whenever I’ve done this for a client, she has loved it. One of them asked me half-jokingly, “Could you please just follow me around this way until I have my baby? Maybe then I could get some sleep!”) The Victorians did have a tradition for pregnancy called a confinement, when a pregnant woman would stay at home and lounge about in whatever state of undress suited her, and the length of confinement varied widely depending on a woman’s individual health and economic status. I shall leave that book to be written by someone with personal experience.

  Women’s bodies and what we do with them create controversy. It is curious that otherwise rational people—individuals who would never give credence to tales of Pop Rocks killing child actors or of haunted truck stops—are eager

  The 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue offered its Yatisi corset in various styles. Shown are the fashionable model; the Abdominal Yatisi corset, “introduced specially for married ladies” (note the extra laces at the sides to allow the abdomen to expand during pregnancy); and the Yatisi Nursing corset (note the pivoting bust pads).

  to believe the most fantastic legends about corsetry. An obnoxiously pervasive example of this is the myth of rib removal. My high school German teacher had told my class this one, with all the heavy-handed persuasive powers of an authoritative German who is utterly convinced of the idea she is espousing. “Doctors used to take out the two little ribs at the bottom of a woman’s chest,” she said, tracing the bones on her own torso. “That’s how they got their waists so little. You can’t make a waist that small without taking out ribs. All you have to do is look at pictures to know that!” (In retrospect, I can think of absolutely no reason why she should have been discussing corsets at all in what was purportedly a grammar class. Frau Schmidt dearly enjoyed tangents.) As an earnest young scholar with a deep respect for my teachers, I had believed this as I had believed all instruction, from the information that d = 2r, to the fact that Pluto is the ninth planet. When I went back as an adult to reexamine it, however, it made even less sense than my old literature teacher’s opinion that there is artistic merit in Melville’s Billy Budd.

  Early surgery was strictly of the slash-and-burn variety. Used as a last resort in situations where the only alternative was immediate death of the patient, it chiefly consisted of the sawing-off of already mangled limbs, followed by cauterization by hot iron, boiling oil, or other such crude methods. Over the course of centuries, surgeons had been slowly pulling their profession out of its medieval origins and tactics, but the ability to anesthetize a patient during surgery was not achieved until 1846, with the first ether experiments (the use of chloroform in surgery was adopted the next year). Even after this breakthrough allowed surgical patients to be rendered unconscious, any cutting of the body remained an incredibly risky procedure for decades, due to the danger of infection. Wounds were treated with various substances from cold boiled water to bread poultices, and staphylococcus bacteria and streptococcal infections could cause death from minor cuts, let alone major thoracic surgery. It would be nearly twenty years before Joseph Lister (working from knowledge of Pasteur’s germ theories) popularized the idea of sterilization of medical environments. It would take longer still for his efforts to take root in the conservative medical community: acidic sterilization of tools and durable materials was finally in widespread use by 1880; bandages, medical gowns, and soft goods that could not withstand acid would not be disinfected (by steam) until the 1890s.

  The last two decades of the nineteenth century brought changes in medicine which were, for their times, giant leaps forward. Skin grafts and appendectomies were pioneered, and for the first time in history a woman stood some chance of surviving a cesarean section. However, surgery remained fraught with risk and potential complications. (Blood transfusions, necessary to replace vital fluids lost during surgery, were not successful until after the discovery of blood-type groupings in the twentieth century.)25 Serious work in plastic surgery was not considered until the time of the First World War, when it was developed as a way to reconstruct the shattered features of severely wounded veterans.

  Consider, therefore, the surgical situation in the Victorian era: there will not be any replacement for blood lost during the procedure; sterilization, if it is used at all, is a new concept, and the entire operation will likely be done by a combination of gaslight and what sunlight can be let into the operating room through windows and mirrors. Under the circumstances, one would be forgiven for balking at the idea of any surgical intervention, even for a need as pressing as a ruptured appendix. The idea of considering it for an elective procedure would have been madness.

  Moreover, there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that cosmetic rib removal has ever been performed, past or present, madness or no. In her book, The Corset: A Cultural History, Valerie Steele describes how, in her many years of very active research (she is the chief curator and acting director at the Fashion Institute of Technology), she has never found any credible documentation of such surgery ever taking place.26 She even interviewed modern physicians on the subject of whether such an operation could be performed with modern surgical technology. While the medical professionals grudgingly admitted that, in theory, such an operation might be possible, they were very explicit in pointing out that because of the proximity of the floating ribs to the lungs, such an operation would be extremely dangerous, even with the most modern of techniques.27 Any surgeon who would attempt such a risky procedure for cosmetic reasons would not only put his patient’s life in danger, but also jeopardize his medical license and professional reputation.

  Critics of corsetry seem to be obsessed with bones, likely because of the linguistic confusion surrounding the matter of millinery ribs and bones versus the osseous variety. After reading about the so-called “corseted skeletons” in museums—deformed skeletons alleging to be examples of damage caused by corsetry—I brought up the subject with an old college buddy of mine who was visiting from Montana.

  Tom and I had met when he’d been the president of the University of Washington’s archery club and I’d been a club member; back in the days when I’d been double-majoring in international studies and French, and he’d been multiple-majoring in (as it seemed to me) every branch of science known to man. His current laundry list of credentials includes university degrees in biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, conservation biology, geology, and paleobiology. He’s now a research scientist at a laboratory in Bozeman, Montana. Specifically, he is a taphonomist, which means that bones (and the ways in which they can be changed) are his specific area of study.

  “And everything I’ve read about it,” I told him eagerly, “says that the reason the nineteenth-century skeletons look different isn’t that the corsets changed them; it’s that the skeletons were boiled, then hung when they were mounted. So the warping was actually done by the preservation process!”

  He looked as though I’d just eagerly informed him that mammals breathe air. “Well, yeah!” He tilted his head, and shrugged. “I always ask what people are going to do with
specimens when they ask me to clean them. It totally makes a complete difference in how you prepare them.”

  Tom has cleaned, prepared, and studied more bones of more species of animals than most people would care to even encounter. One of his favorite ­methods of removing flesh from specimen bones is that of using dermestid ­beetles to eat away the unwanted tissue (a technique popularized around the mid-­twentieth century), but he uses a great variety of cleaning techniques depending upon the specimen and the situation. The nineteenth-century technique of boiling specimens is one that is still very much in use by modern ­scientists, and Tom’s extensive experience with it is ongoing. His roommates have learned not to ask what he is cooking when they come home to find a large pot of something bubbling away on the stove.

  “When you boil a skeleton,” he would explain to me in a later discussion of the same topic. “All the soft tissue goes away, including the cartilage that holds the rib cage together. So the ribs fall off the vertebrae and the sternum. What this means is that when people rearticulate the skeletons, the people putting the bones back together make any deformities you see in the skeleton.”

  It’s useful to have a research scientist as a friend. When I became thoroughly weary of hearing the tired old yarn about corsets breaking bones, I wrote to Tom and asked if it was even physically possible for a corset to break human ribs. He responded by sending me a sizable heap of papers documenting various studies that have been performed to determine the strength of human rib bones. The overarching theme of all the research conclusions was that ribs are remarkably strong: they can generally be fractured only by extreme trauma, such as in an automobile collision. To give one example of the groupings of data: a master’s thesis28 lists the strains necessary to break ribs taken from human cadavers. In experiments, it required between 39 and 187 newtons of force to break the ribs taken from a sixty-one-year-old woman (­different ribs broke at different levels of force—some ribs are stronger than others within a given individual), and between 85 and 265 newtons of force to break ribs from a sixty-seven-year-old woman. In layman’s terms, this is roughly equivalent to a force between having a nine-pound bowling ball dropped on these women’s ribs and having a small anvil dropped on them! (And remember, these women were in their sixties. Younger, premenopausal women have even stronger ribs.) It would be very hard for a corset to exert the same sort of ­pressure as a falling anvil!

  Corsets can’t take that sort of pressure, and they certainly can’t apply it—they’re just not that strong. The corset would break long before the bones would. Corsets are made of cotton coutil, a fabric about on par with jean denim, and the thread used to stitch them is weaker than the body of the fabric. If any readers remain insistent upon the old myth that corsets break human bones, I would invite them to recall the last time they tore a pair of jeans. I highly doubt they were exerting the force of a falling anvil upon them.

  Of course, as Tom pointed out, “All this data goes out the window for people with osteoporosis. They can sneeze and break a rib.”

  But the anecdotal stories of corset-induced broken ribs never seem to be about osteoporotic old ladies. (The cadavers in the study weren’t exactly in their prime, either. They had died in their sixties, long after menopause, which significantly decreases bone density.) The tales are always of the friend-of-a-friend variety, something someone heard from their friend, who heard it from a cousin, who heard of a proud young lady in the next town who had, from sheer vanity, overtightened her corset and broken a rib and died in consequence. Evidence to prove these stories true never seems to accompany them. Admitting that someone, somewhere, at some point in a long history might actually have been feeble enough—and stupid enough—to break a rib through corsetry is a bit like conceding that, in theory, an alligator could live for a short time in a New York sewer: hardly a reason to believe that it is a commonplace occurrence.

  The body’s rib bones are extremely strong, and the concept of a piece of cotton breaking healthy examples of them is absurd. Equally without merit is the idea that any respectable doctor—past or pre-sent—would remove them for cosmetic reasons, and there is absolutely no evidence that it has ever been done. This is not to say that modern medicine does not have some strangely eager tendencies to perform surgery on other portions of the anatomy, however.

  I would very soon find myself wishing that more of my bones showed the same strength and fortitude of my corseted ribs.

  Gabriel’s great-great-grandmother, Mrs. Abbot Usher.

  11

  Broken Bones

  From Blunders of a Bashful Man (1881). Illustration from a Victorian comic novel, originally published anonymously in 1881 by J.S. Ogilvie Publishing Company.

  By the end of May, I was starting to get the hang of my high heels, and I was wearing my corset nearly twenty-four-seven. I slept in my corset, biked in it, ate in it, did nearly all of my daily activities in it (the only two exceptions being showers and judo). In early May, the scope of those daily activities suddenly suffered a dramatic collapse when I broke my foot in two places.

  I had been part of a certain Seattle judo club for about two and a half years at this point. I do not have a naturally athletic nature and, like most people of a sane disposition, I do possess the standard mammalian aversion to pain. I had joined the club out of a desire to learn how, if I ever should be accosted by a greasy thug in a dark alley, to at least attempt to inflict a few bruises upon him, rather than having to rely strictly on the scream-and-whimper method of defense.

  By this point in the narrative, judo practice was the only public activity for which I left my corset at home. In wrestling, the more flexible a person can be, the more optimally they can fight, and the corset would have added a stiffness that I simply couldn’t have dealt with—plus, I was poor enough at the sport to begin with. (Sports had never been my strong point, and when I started doing judo I was an absolute coordination catastrophe. It had taken me several months to learn to do a somersault, the most basic fall and something most people go into the club knowing, or at least pick up on the first night. A lot of sweat on my part and a tremendous amount of patience from the guys in the club had gradually improved my reflexes, but my progress was slow in the extreme.) Thus, the one time when I did remove my silk-and-steel armor, my protective shell, was the one time when I knew for certain I was going to be physically attacked. (All in good sport, of course.)

  In the two and a half years I had been doing judo, I could not remember a time when I hadn’t had extensive bruises in colors bold enough to rival a Gauguin painting. I had broken the little toe on my left foot twice and sprained an ankle after missing the crash pad and smashing my foot against the dojo wall during throw practice. By this point, I was extremely tired of being bruised and broken. Still, I enjoyed the camaraderie of the group, and it takes a lot for me to quit something.

  On May 31, 2009, at approximately 7:20 p.m., I was sparring with the largest man in the club. A Seattle police detective by profession, he stood a full head taller than myself and outweighed me by an unguessable mass of sheer muscle. I side-swept him, hooking my right leg around his to sweep it out from under him while knocking him off balance. He counter-swept my posted leg, and we went down together.

  An ideal situation would have been a clean takedown with one of us still standing. By secondary preference, I should have rolled fast enough to land my right foot flat before my sparring partner hit the mat. What actually happened, though, was so far from ideal that it wouldn’t even recognize the word.

  It was too fast for conscious thought or decision, just a flash reflex that knew I was falling incorrectly and I had to protect my knee. So I twisted my leg and my foot with it in midair. The result was that my foot had just come perfectly vertical above my toes on the mat, like a ballerina en pointe, when Bill—all six-foot-three, two-hundred-odd pounds of him—came crashing down on top of my heel, effectively folding my foot over on itself.

  I wasn’t even aware at the time that I’d s
creamed, but afterward one of the club members described the noise I made as “the most awful sound.”

  Several thoughts had entered my head during this moment, so quickly each successive idea overlay and jumbled into the others, like broken glass thrown at high velocity against concrete. The first was brutal animal pain, primitive beyond vocabulary; then came the knowledge of a single word: broken. Against this smashed the first coherent thought, “I can’t have broken my foot! I won’t be able to wear my high heels!”

  Instantly, I was surrounded by every club member who was there that night. “What’d you hurt? Tell us!”

  I rocked slightly toward the wall, stuffing my fist in my mouth and biting down hard, trying to overwhelm a pain I couldn’t control with one that I could.

  “What’d you hurt?”

  I couldn’t answer, couldn’t think words, but all around me the question was insistent.

  “What’d you hurt?”

  “Foot! Foot!” The word came out explosively. My grammar was gone.

  Gently and competently, they stretched out both my legs straight. “Which foot?”

  The pain had driven out words like “left” and “right.” I pointed.

  Strong hands laid my trembling foot flat against the mat. “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  I tried, gasped in pain.

  “Are there shooting pains going up into your knee?”

  I shook my head. The pain was all in my foot.

  “Can you feel this?” Someone had grabbed a Phillips screwdriver from the tool can and was carefully poking my foot.

  I gasped, nodded.

  “Can you feel this?” Another spot was prodded. I winced, glaring. “That’s good! If it’s numb, that’s bad.”