Dear List:
Has anyone been watching 1900 House on PBS?
The women in the family were experiencing shortness of breath, and the cause
was determined to be their corsets, which they were supposed to wear tightly
laced, in keeping with the fashion of the times.
(They even showed diagrams that illustrated how long-term wear of corsets
moved the internal organs around!)
It got me wondering how the divas of the day--Melba, for instance, or
Tetrazini--were able to sing the way they did in those contraptions.
Now I know that you can "lean" against the corset to maintain some expansion
of the ribs, but how do you get a really decent breath in the first place
when wearing a tightly laced corset?
Judy
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