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The Corset X-Rays of Dr Ludovic O'Followell (1908)

X-Ray images of women wearing corsets from the second volume of the French doctor Ludovic O'Followell's <em>Le Corset</em> (1908).

A columnist for the deluxe corsetier’s magazine Les Dessous Elégance, the French doctor was responding to a nineteenth-century backlash against bound support, the most extreme elements of which castigated women seeking a “wisp waist” as criminals with perverted taste, who intentionally harmed their childbearing abilities for the sake of vanity. From the late 1860s through the early 1890s, The Lancet published scores of articles decrying the corset’s effects on organ health, costal breathing, and rib structure. As a skeptical Los Angeles Herald reporter summed up: “In short, he claims that women’s dress has caused a frightful physical deterioration in the human species.” In response to these debates, Dr. O’Followell first modified the materials of various corsets, so that their features would be expressed through radiography, and then imaged both the bodies of the healthy and those who “abused” the garb.

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