In 1902, shortly before Dr. Ludovic O’Followell published the first volume of Le Corset, Dr. Phillippe Maréchal, “one of the best known ladies’ doctors in Paris”, proposed a law banning women under the age of thirty from wearing corsets — punishable by three months imprisonment — that would force corset vendors to track the name, age, and address of all customers. 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. His conclusion, distilled in the second volume’s preface, is that a “harmless corset, the ideal corset, at least medically speaking, can exist”. Yet O’Followell’s treatise also reveals the garment’s potential effects on the thorax, liver, intestines, and other organs vital to life if worn to extremes or from childhood. In a curious detail, it seems x-rays were penetrating corsets within two years of their discovery, with the Queen of Portugal supposedly asking for images of how her organs were arranged while wearing one.