In this striking work, Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring turns his anatomical expertise toward a pressing social practice: the tight-lacing of corsets. Through detailed observation and illustration, he demonstrates how fashionable dress could deform the ribcage, displace internal organs, and compromise respiration. The images transform the body into a site of both scientific inquiry and cultural critique, revealing the tension between aesthetic ideals and physiological reality. Positioned at the end of the early modern anatomical tradition, Sömmerring’s work reflects a new precision in medical illustration—one that not only maps the body, but also interrogates the forces that shape it.