Domestic medicine : or, the family physician. A treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases, by regimen and simple medicines: With an appendix, containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners / by William Buchan.
- Buchan William, 1729-1805.
- Date:
- 1817
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Domestic medicine : or, the family physician. A treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases, by regimen and simple medicines: With an appendix, containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners / by William Buchan. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![nature are highly pernicious. The most destructive of them in this country is that of squeezing the stomach and bowels in- to as narrow a compass as possible, to procure what is falsely called a fine shape *. By this practice, the action of the sto- mach and bowels, the motion of the heart and lungs, and al- most all the vital functions, are obstructed. Hence proceed indigestions, syncopes or fainting fits, coughs, consumption of the lungs, and other complaints so common among females. —• The feet likewise often suffer by pressure. How a small foot came to be reckoned genteel I will not pretend to say ; but certain it is, that this notion has made many persons feme. Almost nine-tenths of mankind are troubled with corns—a dis- ease that is seldom or never occasioned but by strait shoes. Corns are not only very troublesome, but by rendering people unable to walk, they may likewise be considered as the remote cause of other diseases •]*. The size and figure of the shoe ought certainly to be adapted to the foot. In children, the feet are as well shaped as the hands, and the motion of the toes as free and easy as that of the fingers; yet few persons in the advanced periods of life are able to make any use of their toes. They are generally, by narrow shoes, squeezed all of a heap, and often laid over one another in such a manner as to be rendered altogether inca- pable of motion. Nor is the high heel less hurtful than the narrow toe. A lady may seem taller for walking on her tip- toes, but she will never walk well in this*manner. It strains her joints, distorts her limbs, makes her stoop, and utterly de- stroys all her ease and gracefulness of motion ; it is entirely owing to shoes with high heels and narrow toes, that not one female in ten can be said to walk well. In fixing on the clothes, due care should be taken to avoid all tight bandages. Garters, buckles, &c. when drawn too tight, not only prevent the free motion and use of the parts about which they are bound, but likewise obstruct the circula- tion of the blood, which prevents the equal nourishment and • This madness seems to have pervaded the minds of mothers in every age and country. Terence, in his Comedy of the Eunuch, ridicules the Roman matron* for attempting to mend the shape of their daughters. j- We often see persons who are rendered quite lame by the nails of their toes having grown into the flesh, and frequently hear of mortifications proceeding from this cause. All these, and many other inconveniences attending the feet, must be imputed solely to the use of short and tight shoes. Though we hear frequently of plasters, salves, ointments, &c. for craeicaitHg corns, yet they arc never known to piffeluce that effect. The only rational mode of proceeding is to soften the corn a little by immersion in warm water, and then to cut it carefully, and to renew this operation every week, till the scarf skin is re- duced to its original or natural thinness, after which it must be preserved from the imitating pressure of strait shoes, which had at first occasioned the painful callosity](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21722092_0094.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
