Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1882 — Concerning the Feet. [ARTICLE]

Concerning the Feet.

A well-known surgeon who has made a specialty of diseases of the leg and foot lately asserted that most of these diseases lind their beginning in the injury to the nerves and muscles done by high-heeled shoes. By the compression and false position into which the foot and ankle are thrown, some of the muscles are rendered totally useless, while a strain is put upon others which they are unable to bear; the toes are displaced, corns, bunions and scaly soles are prodneedThe nerves are bruised and actual disease follows. This crnel distortion begins usually when a child is about two Tears old, and its fond mother thinks it time to “shape its feet,” which is done by a pretty pair of stiff-laced heeled boots or shoes. An orthopedic surgeon in New York published, not long since, a statement that the number of splayed feet in the country was increasing rapidly. "A splayed foot is one in which the arch of the instep is permanently broken down ;* the foot is flat, ungainly and weak. The cause he atiributes in the main to high-heeled shoes; the French shoes in which the heel is placed a little forward, being less injurious than that made by American shoemakers, in which it is placed at the back, and thus the strain is made greater. The whole weight of the body in both cases falls on tine small bones of the centre of the foot, which stretch like the span of a bridge from the piers of the tom at one end to the peaked heel at the other. Other causes of splayed feet are the habit among littje girls of excessive jumping the rope, and a like immoderate tise of roller skates. Moderate use of either it wholesome exercise; bnt it should lje moderate. The girls are not alone culpable on this medical indictment of vanity. Within the last year or two it has been the fashion among boys and very young men to wear shoes that run to a point and turn up in front slightly. The whole, of the five toes are contracted to the) width of an inch. The shape of the foot is at once distorted to deformity, and the walk, which to be manly should l»e firm and free, becomes uneasy and mincing. Imagine the great athletes in the Greek arenas tip-toing in these pointed shoes. One could laugh at the foolish boys if we did not know the stores of suffering which they are laying up for the future, in swollen bunions and enlarged joints. One »cx has its share of vanity as well as the other. ( And the punishment of a passing folly in this isjsnre and heavy.— Youth V Companion. “Do not waste life in doubt* and fears; spend yourself on the work l>efore you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the 1 tours of the ago* that foltew.”