The Caledonian

The Chinese foot-torture.

The means taken to effect the alteration of women's feet in China are decidedly prejudicial to health, and frequently attended with fatal consequences. This act was ascertained by a clever young naval surgeon who was for some time stationed at Chusan. It happened that during an excursion into the country, where he found a child about eight years old very ill, and suffering under a severe hectic fever; upon examination he discovered that her feet were undergoing the process of distortion; he was informed that she had been a year under this treatment. Moved by pity for the little sufferer, he proceeded to remove the bindings, and fomented the feet, which were covered with ulcers and inflammation. The change in shape had already commenced by the depression of the toes. The child was much relieved by, and evidently grateful for, his treatment. On taking his leave he warned the mother that she would certainly lose her child if the bands were replaced; but his remonstrances were of no avail. Whenever he returned (and this happened frequently,) he always found them on again, the woman urging as an excuse that her daughter had better die than remain unmarried, and that without improved feet such a calamity would be her inevitable lot. As might be expected, the child grew worse and worse. After a longer interval than usual, he once again revisited the house, but found it untenanted, and a little coffin lying at the door, in which he discovered the body of his poor young patient.-Loch's Closing Events of the Campaign in China.

[All will feel the monstrous character of this madness of the Chinese females; but is the waist constriction of our own any better? The extravagance is not with us, perhaps, so very great in degree, but it is equally bad in kind, and there can be no doubt that it also causes coffins to be laid down at doors for "young patients." We fear that it is an extravagance not in the way of being diminished. There has been introduced of late years an atrocious piece of enginery called the French stay, for casting up the frames of young ladies in an artificial and unyielding shape, in which they hold the ideal of form to be realized. Specimens of it may be seen glass cased in windows in London, and it has also travelled into the provinces. It leaves its victims hardly room to breathe, and entirely takes away the power of raising their arms above their heads. What they might deem its worst peculiarity, if they could judge of it at all, it makes one half of them round-shouldered, and thus adds a real deformity where it only creates an imaginary elegance. But we must cut short, remembering that this is the subject upon which it is of no use to speak.-Chambers's Edinburgh Jour.]