Corsets and Ribs: Bending Reported in Seven Paris Skeletons

On The Met's 1880s corset, the front closes with five metal studs, each pushed through a loop [1]. In 1793 the physician Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring argued that lacing the body into stays reshaped the ribs and pushed organs out of place [2]. In 2015 Rebecca Gibson reported bent ribs and spinal bones in seven women's skeletons in Paris, in a study she called preliminary [3]. For broken ribs and moved organs, no study read for this page measured either, so both are marked evidence insufficient.

This page compares those sources and gives no advice on wearing, lacing or health. Nor does it argue that corsets were harmless, which one small study could not show.

What a corset is built from

Sömmerring described the stays of his day as a cone sewn from strips, usually open at the back, with the two edges meeting when laced [2]. The strips, he wrote, were commonly of whalebone or cane, formerly of iron, and some stays had steel rods called planchettes set in at the front or back [2]. A surviving pair adds another material. The Rijksmuseum records its green taffeta stays of 1740–1790 (BK-1978-295) as made with osiers, which is willow, along with linen, taffeta and silk [4].

The Met's early 19th-century corset (2013.515) is recorded as cotton, linen, silk, metal and bone, and the detail photograph shows metal-rimmed eyelets for the lace [5]. On the 1880s corset at the top of this page, the front opens on a busk, the fastening strip down the center. Metal studs on one edge pass through loops on the other [1]. Here stays means the 18th-century garment and corset the 19th-century one; the 18th-century clothing entry places stays among a woman's layers of about 1770–1800.

What Sömmerring blamed on stays in 1793

Sömmerring wrote as a practicing physician, basing his account on his own comparisons of bodies changed by stays with bodies never laced [2]. His Über die Wirkungen der Schnürbrüste (On the Effects of Stays), printed in Berlin in 1793, calls itself a new, completely reworked edition [2]. It does two separate things.

First, it lists. Sömmerring set down about a hundred complaints that physicians had blamed on stays, naming one authority for each [2]. They run from headaches to a "Sieches und kurzes Leben," a sickly and short life, credited to Camper [2]. Then he says he will discuss in detail only the effects on body shape and on pregnancy, birth and nursing [2].

Second, it argues from anatomy: the chest is shaped like a cone with its point upward, stays like one with its point downward, so the ribs, the spine or the breastbone must give way [2]. Lacing, in his account, pushes the lower ribs together and draws each rib's front end toward its back end [2]. Over time it presses the spinous processes, the bony points down the back of the spine, close together and out of line [2]. He also describes the preserved body of a barely grown girl with a deep furrow below the breastbone that, in his reading, lacing had made [2].

What one small skeleton study found

Wider than a phone screen: swipe sideways along the diagram, or open it full size.

Rebecca Gibson's paper in NEXUS: The Canadian Student Journal of Anthropology calls itself a preliminary morphological examination, a first look at bone shape [3]. She examined seven mounted skeletons of women in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, a collection assembled piecemeal from unrelated individuals [3]. She also examined 17 sets of loose bones from St Bride's Lower Churchyard, held by the Museum of London [3].

In all seven Paris skeletons, Gibson reported rib and spinous-process deformation consistent with long-term pressure on growing bones [3]. The ribs from the fourth to the tenth pair curved more than normal, some into an S shape, and the eleventh and twelfth were sometimes pressed almost vertical [3]. In cross-section the chests were round, whereas a typical rib cage is oval, wider from side to side than from front to back [3]. She weighed other causes, among them rickets and deformity present from birth, and found that the pattern did not fit them [3].

The London bones were loose and could not be reassembled into whole rib cages, but Gibson describes the same pattern in their spinous processes and gives three chest-width measurements [3]. Sömmerring had described a similar crowding of the spinous processes in 1793 [2].

Did corsets shorten women's lives?

Gibson also looked at ages at death. In her samples the women reached or passed the life expectancy at birth of their time and place, and a few may have outlived the average age at death once childhood deaths are set aside [3]. She notes that this says nothing about their quality of life [3]. With seven skeletons in Paris and 17 sets of bones in London, the result describes those women, not corset wearers in general.

Broken ribs and moved organs

Did corsets break ribs?

Sömmerring raised the idea, but as a belief rather than a case. Some stays, he wrote, were so firm, hard and unbending that violent lacing would sooner break the ribs ("eher die Rippen zerbrechen") than change their shape [2]. In the passages of his treatise read for this page, he reports no broken rib.

Gibson's paper does not count fractures. Two of her photographs of London bones mark rib breaks, one labelled as before death, but the text does not discuss them or tie them to corsets [3]. No source read here measured how often corset wearers broke ribs, and neither Gibson nor the passages of Sömmerring read here mention removing ribs to narrow the waist. Fractures are marked evidence insufficient.

Did corsets move organs?

On organs the only source read here is Sömmerring, who wrote that lacing squeezes the lower lungs, forces the diaphragm up and changes the stomach's place and shape [2]. The colon, he said, is pushed up, while the rectum, uterus and bladder are pushed down [2]. As support he cited Mascagni's life-size drawing of a liver misshapen by stays and said he had seen several such livers himself [2]. Gibson's study examined bones, not organs, and no study read here measured organ position, so it is marked evidence insufficient.

What about the other complaints?

Everything else on Sömmerring's list rests on the testimony he gathered, one authority per complaint [2]. None of it is tested in the passages of his treatise read here or in Gibson's paper, so each complaint stays at evidence insufficient, except the short life covered above.

The claims, side by side

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The table repeats the chart, one claim per row. Each row names who made the claim and the kind of evidence behind it. A claim with no readable study behind it is marked evidence insufficient, as the site's method page explains.

Gibson has since published a 2020 book, The Corseted Skeleton: A Bioarchaeology of Binding, and a 2023 article in American Anthropologist on "the historical inaccuracies of the bioarchaeology of corsets," in its title's words [7][8]. Neither could be read for this page, so nothing here rests on them. Arsenic green dresses raise a similar question about clothes and harm, and the arsenic green entry sorts it by test records.

Cite this page

Sources

1. 1The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Corset," American, 1880s, C.I.39.18.1 (Gift of Mrs. Erastus Hopkins, 1939). Catalogue data row on the Wikimedia Commons file page. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corset_MET_CI39.18.1_F.jpg (collection record (catalogue data, CC0))
2. 2Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring. Über die Wirkungen der Schnürbrüste. Neue, völlig umgearbeitete Auflage. Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1793. Wellcome Library copy, Internet Archive b30345649. https://archive.org/details/b30345649 (scanned copy, read for verification)
3. 3Rebecca Gibson. "Effects of Long Term Corseting on the Female Skeleton: A Preliminary Morphological Examination." NEXUS: The Canadian Student Journal of Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2015): 45–60. https://doi.org/10.15173/nexus.v23i2.983 (full text; paraphrased)
4. 4Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. "Korset van groene tafzijde met roze schouderlinten" (stays of green taffeta with pink shoulder ribbons), possibly Netherlands, 1740–1790, BK-1978-295. https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200112802 (collection record (catalogue data, CC0))
5. 5The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Corset," probably British, early 19th century, cotton, linen, silk, metal, bone, 2013.515 (Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2013). Catalogue data row on the Wikimedia Commons file page. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corset_MET_2013.515_d1.jpg (collection record (catalogue data, CC0))
6. 6The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anonymous (Imprimerie Moine), "Jupons, corsets et relève jupe de la Maison de Plument," from Les Modes Parisiennes Illustrées, 1862, steel engraving with hand coloring, sheet 27 × 20 cm, 40.124.121 (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1940). Catalogue data row on the Wikimedia Commons file page. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jupons,_corsets_et_rel%C3%A8ve_jupe_de_la_Maison_de_Plument,_from_Les_Modes_Parisiennes_Illustr%C3%A9es_MET_DP819137.jpg (collection record (catalogue data, CC0))
7. 7Rebecca Gibson. The Corseted Skeleton: A Bioarchaeology of Binding. Springer International Publishing, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50392-5 (bibliographic record only)
8. 8Rebecca Gibson. "Theorizing with incorrect data: A new look at the historical inaccuracies of the bioarchaeology of corsets." American Anthropologist 125, no. 3 (2023): 715–726. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13882 (bibliographic record only)