A Crumbling Arch.

A digression, I hope, will be pardoned here before the value and beauty of the plantar arch and its mode of forging are described, and it is possible the latter may add some force to the former. Scientific (or, must I say?) semi-scientific writings are not concerned with the snobbishness of much of the pride of birth which still survives among us. But I would indeed think myself to be doing “my bit” if I could induce the present genera­tion of young women and men to think highly of their plantar arches, nobler evidence of a “good” family than soft fair skin, taper fingers, Grecian nose, slender waist or that hair of which the decaying line of the long-haired kings of old France were too proud. For one reason or another, probably analogous to those for which he has lost so much the vigour of his hair of the scalp, or his dwindling wisdom-teeth and shrinking little toes, in other words, racial degenera­tion, modern man seems to be losing his plantar arch. For about three years I have made careful but saddening study of the ankles and feet of young women, and have embodied it in a variety of journals. This study has included about two thousand examples in young women of incipient or advanced flat-footedness as revealed, nay, flaunted before us in our towns and villages. This revela­tion has been offered by women’s shortened skirt, so that one can now note for oneself the ugly and disabling ankles and feet in the streets of any town, without the complicated business of a surgical examina­tion. Such an examina­tion, as it happens, and as it is usually undertaken, serves only to show a moderately advanced degree of this deformity, indeed, just so much as induces a patient to go to a doctor for relief of pain or obvious deformity. This is wholly insufficient for the study of a defect which in the various degrees of its development affects nearly 90 per cent. of all youngish women so far observed and noted. The doctors may—or may not—cure this evil, but they are not likely to find time even to discover during their strenuous lives, the great spread of this physical defect. But the merciful ukases of fashion, from Paris or elsewhere, and the obvious benefits, for once, of a fashion, are so powerful that the short skirt has remained with us for several years past and does not seem likely to go. I can only hope it will last until women who lead their sex in these days become ashamed of the feet of their sisters and their own, and make a forcible attack upon the Health Minister or Minister of Education, or both, so that systematic foot-drill in all elementary schools may be established. No other means than this, added to improved general health, can be conceived as able to correct so widely spread a deformity. I do not desire to be considered as making an attack on the bodily charms of women, for whose multifarious attractions I yield to none in sincere regard. But here is the revela­tion, here are the cases walking unashamed before us, and if the skirts should lengthen again and cruelly hide up the evil, no one will be induced again to take up the unpopular attitude of saying that nearly all young women have feet that are deformed and ugly and, therefore, more or less inefficient. There is, alas! only too much reason to know that the evil is great among the better class, even of boys, for in 1919 Captain Coote said publicly at a Schoolmasters’ Conference that fully 30 per cent. of the new boys entering leading public schools had flat-foot, and Captain Coote, the highest exponent of physical training in the Navy, knows a flat-foot when he sees it. The measures here suggested in connec­tion with the feet of women have the great merit that from them boys and girls will alike benefit.