Probably most of the ailments there treated were preventable, but worst of all were the bound feet and the ailments the women suffered from in consequence. It is not good manners to speak about a woman's feet, and the women themselves rarely refer to them, but naturally I was interested in the custom, and whenever the doctor got a “good” bound foot, which probably meant a very bad one, she sent over for me to come and see it. Anyone who has once seen a bound foot will never forget it. It always smelt abominably when first the bandages were taken off, and the first thing the nurses did was to provide a square kerosene tin of hot water in which to soak the foot well.
Well washed, the feet might be looked at. Shansi especially is the home of the bound foot, most of the women have such small feet that they are confined for the greater part of their lives to the k'ang. I remember Dr Lewis in all seriousness saying that he thought on the whole a Chinese woman was better without her feet. And I'm inclined to think he was right. The toes, all except the big toe, are pressed back till they touch the heel, the bandage is put on and drawn tighter and tighter every day, and if the girl is healthy and big-boned, so much the worse for her. No matter the size of the girl, the foot must conform to the one standard. In Shansi when I was there the shoes were generally about four inches long, and I have taken shoes of that length off a tall and strapping woman who was tottering along with the aid of a stick. What she must have suffered to get her feet to that size is too terrible to imagine. She must have been suffering still for that matter. If the instep after the tightest binding still sticks up the girl's marriage chances are seriously interfered with, and then the mother or some feminine relative takes a meat-chopper and breaks the bone till she can bind the foot small enough. This information I got from the American lady who looks after the women in the mission in Fen Chou Fu; and at T'ai Yuan Fu the sister in the women's hospital added the gruesome detail that they sometimes pull off the little girls' toe-nails so that they may not interfere with the binding!
And at the women's hospital at Pao Ting Fu I saw the finished product. The big toe stuck straight out, red, possibly because of the soaking in hot water—I never had courage to look at one unsoaked—and ghastly-looking, the other toes were pressed back against the heel and the heel went up and was exactly like the Cuban heels affected by smartly dressed women, only this time it had been worked in flesh and blood. The whole limb from the big toe to the knee was hard and immovable as stone. If you press ordinary flesh anywhere it pits, just yields a little, not so a Chinese woman's leg and foot. It is thin, perished, literally hard as marble. Once having seen a foot unbound, it is a wonder to me that any woman should walk at all. And yet they do. They hold out their arms and walk, balancing themselves, and they use a stick. Sometimes they walk on their heels, sometimes they try the toe, but once I realised what those bandages concealed it was a painful and dreadful thing to me to see a Chinese woman walking. In spite of the hardness of the flesh, or probably because of it, they get bad corns on the spot upon which they balance, and sores, very often tuberculous, eat into the foot.
But the evil does not stop at the foot. In Shansi it seemed to me every woman's face was marked with the marks of patient suffering. Travelling I often got a glimpse of one peering out of a cart or litter at the foreigner, and that face invariably was patient, pallid and worn, for foot-binding brings no end of evils in its train. The doctor at Fen Chou Fu declared that nine-tenths of the women who came to him for treatment suffered from tuberculosis in some form or another, and this in a climate that in the winter must outrival in dryness Davos Platts. Not a few, too, develop spinal curvature low down in the back, and often because of the displacement of the organs they die in child-birth. A missionary in one of the little towns I passed through, a trained nurse, told me that when a woman suffered from what she (the woman) called leg-waist pains—the doctor called it osteomalacia—her case was hopeless, she could not give birth to a child. Often this nurse had been called in to such cases, and she could do nothing to help the suffering girl. She could only stand by and see her die. I could well believe these tales of suffering. In Fen Chou Fu and in Pao Ting Fu the women of the poorer classes freely walked the streets, and their crippled condition was patent to all eyes. But in some towns it is not considered seemly for any woman to be seen in the streets. Some reason established this custom long ago: the reason passes, but China is the most conservative of nations, and the custom remains. But the reason for foot-binding is not very clear. There is something sexual at the bottom of it, I believe, but why a sick and ailing woman should be supposed to welcome the embraces of her lord more readily than one abounding in health passes my understanding. Of course we remember that not so very long ago, in the reign of Victoria, practically the delicate woman who was always ailing was held up to universal admiration. Look at the swooning heroines of Dickens and Thackeray. But let no man put the compressed waist on the same plane as foot-binding. I have heard more than one man do so, but I unhesitatingly affirm they are wrong. Foot-binding is infinitely the worse crime. The pinched-in waist did not begin till the girl was at least well on in her teens, and it was only the extreme cases—and they did it of their own free will I presume—who kept up the pressure always. There was always the night for rest, whereas the Chinese women get no rest from torture.