Beauty Culture (Woodbury)/Chapter 5

In its natural undistorted condition, the foot is almost as beautiful and expressive a member as the hand. It can he trained to do wonderful things. A ballet dancer, such as Fannie Elsler, whose music of motion extorted the ejaculation "divine" from the Concord philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, revcals the marvellous strength and pliability which the foot may acquire by assiduous cultivation. Even in its ordinary function of walking, the foot's capacity for expression strikes the eye. Virgil makes her gait the most significant sign of the goddess of beauty, Venus:

Furthermore, the foot may be trained to do many things that would seem utterly outside its particular province. Men and women who have lost the use of their hands have learned to write with their toes, to sew and to embroider. To box with the feet in connection with the head and fists, is not an uncommon accomplishment among Frenchmen. It is called the savate.

​Racial Characteristics.—Races are markedly distinguished by differences in character of the foot. The English foot is rather fleshy, but short and not so strong as it should be. The Scotch foot, high and thick, shows power and endurance.

The French foot is recorded as long, narrow, and well proportioned.

The Russian foot is peculiar in that the skin between the toes is generally webbed to the first joint. The Tartar has toes of equal length.

The Mexican Indian foot is quite short and strong, with a noticeable distance between the great and second toes.

Savage tribes, such as the Mexican peons (now a gentle, industrious people) were a few centuries ago, usually show a decided distance between the great and second toes, undoubtedly due to the spreading of these parts in climbing trees.

The feet of Americans are well formed, but inclined to be too short for the height of the individual, especially in women.

The length of the foot of a woman five feet and six inches tall should be nine and one-third inches. Such a foot should not be thick and heavy, but slender and of delicate look, though firm of skin and with a well-defined arch at the instep that should be rather more marked than that of a man.

Structure of the Foot.—The human foot may be truly said to be of a higher order than that of any of the so-called lower animals in that it is constructed not only to give ease to every poise and movement of the body, but to bear this weight gracefully and to add by its own movements, as well as its own shape, to the grace or beauty of the individual.

Fig. 23.THE ANATOMY OF THE FOOT

sings the old English poet, Sir John Suckling, who understood the esthetic quality of feet as well as any physiologist appreciates their structural perfection.

Twenty-six bones, beautifully arranged, bound up together by ligaments and muscles and permitting more or less notion on one another, are found in the font. (See Figure 23.)

The motion is chiefly on its outer or toc division and comparatively little behind the ball. Of these bones, fourteen may be said to belong to the toes, the rest composing the formation of the tarsus.

Of these fourteen toe bones, the great toc has two, the other toes three each. Back of the toes are the five metatarsal bones, numbered from the great toe one to five, making up the anterior of the arch.

The seven tarsal bones are especially named:

The last four of these make up the posterior of the arch. The anklebone (astralagus) is clasped on each side by the malleolus, a projection from the leg, forming what is called the ankle joint.

Architecturally studied on its inner aspect, the arch is found to rest in front on the anterior heads of the metatarsal bones; but (a point especially to remember, because of its great importance in scientific treatment of the foot) chiefly on the metatarsal of the great toe, and on the os calcis or heelbone behind. The astralagus is the keystone of the arch. (See Figure 24.)

Fig. 24.THE ARCH OF THE FOOT

a=Metatarsalb=Os Calcisc=Astralagus

Ligaments, or strong bands, hold this marvellous piece of mechanism together and thus make it capable of upholding the weight of the body, yielding only a little as one moves, without giving way.

If we stand on one foot, the arch flattens and lengthens. If we rest the foot or dangle it over a chair, the curvature increases.

To have one leg on the floor and the other crossed over its knee gives each foot temporarily a different arch. And so in walking, as the foot is raised, by the action of the muscles, the curvature is immediately increased.

This arch is practically developed to its proper adult form about the sixth year of life; being more or less flattened during infancy and early childhood. Connecting it with the metatarsus, the great toe has but one joint, while each of the smaller toes has two.

From what has been said of the architectural relation of the great toc and the heelbone to the arch as a whole, it will be seen that in walking the chief work of the foot, running along a straight line from heel to great toe, falls upon the latter.

The great toe ought, therefore, as Professor Herman Meyer of the University of Zurich demonstrated over ​fifty years ago, so to lie, when on the ground, that the line of the axis, a line drawn straight through it, backward, would come out at the very centre of the heel. This is the position of a great toe on a perfectly sound foot as exemplified in the illustration Figure 25.

Fig. 25.THE AXIS OF THE FOOT

While insisting on the importance of the great toe, and the special care it should receive, the writer does not mean to minify the value of the smaller toes, or detract from the attention that should be paid to them likewise. They have their uses.

One of these is the giving of side support to the foot, when standing. Another is in walking, to bend in such a way as to press firmly against the ground; in this, too, giving a side support to the foot. The peculiarity about the walking curvature is, that the first joint bends upward strongly, while the second is hollow above. This would give to the smaller toes, if one went barefoot, a little grip on the ground such as is taken by the claws of a bird when walking or hopping about.

In order to ascertain the exact character of the arch effect, the chiropodist should have the patron place the bare foot firmly, but naturally, without undue pressure, on a sheet of paper that has been previously blackened ​with the smoke of burning gun of camphor. The imprint thus made will give a fairly indicative outline as to the perfection of the arch or its deviation from perfection.

A broken-down arch, if complete, gives an outline of the entire sole of the foot, showing the more or less elliptical imprint of the ball of the foot; the dividing line between the round impression of the heads of the smaller toes and the pear-shaped impression of the great toe; the rounded arca of the heel, and a line at the outer border of the foot, more or less pronounced, which connects the imprints of the heel and the ball. A good idea of this impression may be obtained from Figure 26.

Fig. 26.TILE FOOT PRINT

The practitioner, when he has taken several hundred of such arch impressions, will very likely have become such an expert that he will hardly need to take them; the eye will tell him, sometimes at a glance, just what the matter is with the patron's arch, and what should be done to correct it.

In outline the foot from its inner side should appear practically as shown in Figure 27.

Fig. 27.THE NATURAL ARCH

If the arch has become flattened, the bones of the fool spread apart and sink down, so that the entire sole of the foot either touches or almost rests upon the floor. Such a foot is shown in Figure 28.

Fig. 28.THE FLATTENED ARCH

This sinking of the arch varies, of course, with each individual. If after walking for a while, one has a continual dull ache in the foot, particularly the outer side of it, and a corresponding stitch in the calf of the leg, this is a warning that the ligaments of the arch are loosening, and that the arch is likely to fall. Specific cause and treatment will be given later.