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FOOT HEALTH
Have You Bad Feet?
Mrs. Smith is a capable mother who comes to one of our clinics; she is in
her middle thirties and is one of a family of ten. Her father was a farm labourer
who never earned much; her mother was a simple woman, shiftless and
incapable. They lived in a farm cottage in an isolated country village. The
children rarely had enough to eat; once a week, on Sundays, they had a small
piece of meat. They wore each other's cast-off clothes and shoes. There was
no welfare clinic in that neighbourhood; the doctor attended only at times of
crisis. They depended much on the charity of the farmer employer. The older
children dragged up the younger; it is a miracle how they all survived to
adult life.
Mrs. Smith has dreadful feet, the result of ignorance and neglect in childhood.
She is bow-legged—her knees are about two inches apart when her feet
are together. Her ankles tilt over so that she walks on the inner edges of her
feet and she looks flat-footed. On both feet the big toe is bent under the second
toe; the big toe joints bulge inwards towards each other. Each joint is stiff
and the skin over it is red and inflamed. Her other toes are out of line, the little
toe sticks up and has a corn on it.
She is not badly off now, but she spends a fortune on shoes. About every
three weeks she buys a new pair of shoes, generally the wrong fit. For about a
fortnight they look good, then go completely out of shape and look dreadful.
Until she left home and earned her own living, Mrs. Smith was never taken to
a shop to be fitted with shoes. She always wore the cast-off shoes of her older
brothers and sisters. They never had fitted shoes either. Shoes or boots were
bought for them by the farmer when he went to the market town. Mrs. Smith
now finds it painful to walk anything over a mile. In her old age, she will join
the horde of elderly women confined to the house through crippled feet.
Why are her feet like this ? Every child's foot is soft and pliable; it can
be moulded to an unnatural shape by pressure. It takes 20 years for the bones
of the foot to become properly hardened and at any time during this period the
foot may be permanently deformed through ill-fitting footwear. In Mrs. Smith's
case, she began badly by suffering in health through inadequate and wrong
feeding; she must have had rickets in early infancy, which gave her permanently
deformed bow-legs. The bones round her ankle, already soft, but softened still
more by rickets, allowed her foot to tilt over inwards, giving her the flat-footed
appearance. No doubt the shoes and stockings she wore were always ill fitting.
They must frequently have been too short. Her toes were pushed backwards;
the pressure on her big toe pushed the joint out of line, causing the V-type
deformity which we call halux valgus. She says she can remember when she
was about 8 or 9 years old having awful pains in her legs and feet, and how in the
mornings, she could hardly stand on the floor, the pains were so bad. Nobody,
of course, took any notice.
How it Happens.
Now this is by no means an extreme or rare case. There are thousands of
people, especially women, like this today. These deformities are very difficult
if not impossible to cure. It is far better to prevent them ever happening.
Parents should realise how soft is the structure of a child's foot. In badly
fitting shoes, especially those too short and too narrow, the foot takes the shape
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