THE REPUBLICAN

November/December 1880

 

Torture at Harvard University

Cincinnati Gazette

 

            A report has come to us from the city of Cambridge, which we trust is untrue, that the Chinese instructor at Harvard college – a dignitary who dresses in silk and is the author of a volume of poems on which no American critic has been able to pass an adverse judgment, since there is no western scholar who can interpret its tea-chest hieroglyphics – is subjecting his little daughter to the foot-binding process, a fearful torture in itself, and resulting in making the child a cripple for life.  We have been told that the screams of the poor child have been heard by the neighbors.

            The operation has been often described.  Bandages ten feet long and two feet wide are laid on the inside of the instep and carried over the four small toes and around the heel, drawing the two extremities nearer each other, bulging the instep, and making a deep hollow in the sole underneath.  Once a month or oftener the bandage is removed and the feet are soaked and kneaded.  Pulverized alum is put on to prevent the sloughing and putrescence which often occur.  Sometimes a toe or more drops off.  The pain, which is intense, continues about a year, then gradually diminishes, and by the end of the second year the feet are dead and painless.  During the first twelve months the poor girl sleeps only on her back, lying crosswise the bed, with her feet hanging down over the side, so that the edge of the bedstead presses on the tendons and nerves behind the knees in such a way as to dull the pain somewhat.  There she swings her feet and moans, and even in the coldest weather cannot wrap herself in a coverlet, because every return of warmth to her limbs increases the aching.  The sensation is said to be like that of puncturing the joints with needles.

            While the binding is continued, as ever after, her feet are useless for purposes of locomotion.  With dead feet, only two inches long, the woman thus “beautified” is a wretched cripple.  As we have said, it is reported that the learned instructor above mentioned is thus treating his daughter.  He has remarked, we are informed, that were he to live permanently in the United States he would not bind her feet, but he expects to return to China in a year or two, and were she then to have natural feet her social prospects would be ruined.  This may be true, but for the present he is living in Massachusetts, and under Massachusetts laws, and those laws should be invoked to protect the wretched victim of Oriental folly.