Athothis : a satire on modern medicine / by Thomas C. Minor.

coats, vests, and dresses, which interfere with respira- tion, by contracting the expansion of the chest and ab- domen. No wonder the wearers of such costumes pant in distress for want of oxygen, and die of consumption by the millions. The faces and hands of this audience are tense and swollen, and we seek our relaxations to pleasure in garments of fashion, that smother and dis- comfort their wearer. Our men and women squeeze their feet and hands in contracted and ill-fitting boots and shoes, while our girls are pinched in steel corsets." "Good!" cried Athothis, approvingly. "You will presently agree with ine that modern attire is gotten up wholly in the interest of the medical profession. Your doctors, in fact, are molding every thing to serve their own ends. These ladies' corsets especially cause many feminine complaints—cancers, tumors." " Hush !" said Paulus Androcydes. " Do not speak so loud, lest the lady in the box below may overhear even the spiritual observation, and become uneasy. But these corsets are a very old invention; for even Galen decried the use of such instruments of torture. The modern dame of fashion merely imitates her Greek cousin, who donned the sefosdone, and her Roman cousin, who wore the castula. All medical writers of antiquity inveigh against the com- pression of woman's abdomen hjfacice; but the gentler sex ever desired to make their hips appear broader. But, blessed be the memory of Catherine de Medicis, the true inventor of the modern appliance known as the whalebone stay, and praised be Bouvier, the historian of the corset; but cursed, thrice cursed be J. J. Rosseau, that savage critic of feminine underwear. Yet, you must remember that the vast majority of the maids and matrons, comprising this audience, are idle creatures, of