[SOME PRACTICAL HINTS ON COSMETIC MEDICINE.]
By "THE NEW DOCTOR."
PART II.
THE NOSE.
What a great variety of shapes the noses of adults in a civilised country present! You will not find this diversity of shape in new-born infants. Where, then, is the cause of this? There must be some cause, and I think that I can tell you something about the ugly shaped noses, how they have arisen, why they exist, and how they may be prevented.
If you ask six persons what is the good of the nose, five at least will answer "to smell with." Is it likely that an organ so large and exceedingly complex as the nose would only serve the sense of smell—a sense which in man is extremely feeble! No! it has a far more important function to perform, for the nose is the organ through which we breathe. But surely we breathe through our mouths? I am afraid that most of us do, more's the pity! Children at school are often told to breathe through their mouths, and doubtless this helps the development of coughs and colds which are so common during childhood.
Everybody ought to breathe through the nose, but it is not everybody who can do so.
This is a country of catarrhs, and of all the organs in the body, the lining of the nose is the most prone to this form of inflammation. Catarrh of the nose prevents you from breathing properly by blocking up the passages through the nose. This is one of the forms of nasal obstruction, and it is nasal obstruction which produces ugly noses. Long continued obstruction, whatever it is due to, ends by deforming the nose.
To me, a turned up nose, a long thin nose, a very small nose, a nose with small nostrils, or a nose that is flat between the eyes, are the ugly forms, and every one of these may result from nasal obstruction. A few words of description as to how these various deformities of the nose are produced will help you to guard against letting your daughters grow up with deformed noses.
The turned-up nose is very common and when well marked is exceedingly ugly. People who cannot breathe easily through the nose are very fond of sniffing, and this of itself tends to produce a "snub nose." The chief cause, however, of all these forms of noses is that the nose does not grow properly when it is out of working order. Let me explain this more fully by an example. A girl of four years old has "adenoids" at the back of her nose. These prevent her from breathing through her nose. She has therefore to breathe through her mouth. When a girl gets to be thirteen, a great change should occur in the nose; it should get larger and its cavities become more capacious. It is at this period that the definite shape of the nose is fixed. In the case of the girl we mention her nose has been useless from childhood, and nature will never develop a useless organ. When she was a child she had a small nose on a small face, when she becomes a woman she will have a small nose on a big face. Whatever the size of the nose it should fit the face, and a snub nose, or a thin, or a very small, or a flat nose will be the result.