Is Your Collarbone Size English, Irish, or French?

When I'm not playing Baldur's Gate 3, I'm generally trying to do some work on my writing. And that requires research. 

I love doing research. So much so, I am often guilty of going down rabbit holes that have nothing to do with what I started out researching. I'm not alone in this, right?  Right?

..... *crickets*

So anyway, I was doing some research amongst old newspapers, as you do, and one search keyword lead to another and I stumbled across this in The National Gazette (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) from 5 November 1829.  

Okay.

So aside from that last remark about Irish women -- and just what is that, by the way? Is he saying Irish women are "open chested" like French women? Is this some weird way of coding English women as more demure and refined than French and Irish women?  

Ahem. 

Aside from that. 

This "eminent anatomist" has "noticed" French women are shorter and more "open chested" than English women, so decides to make a study of women's clavicles?  Is this science or an excuse to go around touching random women's décolletage? 

He measures the clavicles so... valid science. Definitely. And I have "noticed" that many European chocolates are more creamy and tasty than American ones, so please fund my study into eating chocolate from every country. 

Seriously, this clavicle research sounds more like a naughty schoolboy prank than science. 

The clavicle is your collarbone. So he's not really measuring chests/ribcages, he's measuring shoulders. But if he were talking about shoulder-wideness, the term would be "broad shouldered," not "open chested." 

So I think what he's really talking about is breast size. He's trying to determine which country's women have the larger breasts. 

What does this achieve? I mean, in the field of women's health. How does this study help... anything? 

It's almost as if the study is being done for men to be able to choose the breast-iest country to visit, not for the benefit of women. 

And, historically, that's kinda how the medical field rolled. It's always been done for the benefit of men. 

Women were treated as mere engines of childbirth, inferior to men. They didn't need their own medical research results. Men's results would do just fine.

Is it better today?

Women are underrepresented in clinical trials,  which means they can have more unexpected side effects from medication. 

Women are left out of much medical research,  so it is impossible to know if some diseases or vaccines affect women differently. 

Black women have to fight to get doctors to believe them about their symptoms. Plus size women have the same difficulty. Fighting their doctors' condescension, bias, and racism puts women's lives at risk. 

So, no. The medical field still has a distance to go.

But at least they're not trying to relate breast size to country of residence.