Received: 30 October 2022 Accepted: 1 May 2023 DOI: 10.1111/aman.13882 ESSAY Theorizing with incorrect data: A new look at the historical inaccuracies of the bioarchaeology of corsets Rebecca Gibson Virginia Commonwealth University Correspondence Rebecca Gibson, PhD, Virginia Commonwealth University. Email: rgibson.archaeo@gmail.com, gibsonr3@vcu.edu This essay strives to correct the bioarchaeological record of skeletal changes due to corseting, a currently understudied but impactful subject in biological anthropology. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ([1892] 1994, 7) tells us, via his famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, that “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” Similarly, it is as much a mistake to theorize using singular instances of data or data that can be shown to be incorrect after a more than cursory examination. Such has been the case in various anthropological and bioarchaeological events, including Piltdown Man and Doyle’s own belief in fairies—both of which I will discuss below—and more recently, conclusions made about corseting via historical radiographic documentation. Using two radiographs from the most commonly discussed source on the medical history of the corset, Le Corset by Ludovic O’Followell (1908), 1 I demonstrate that prior to my publication on “Effects of Long Term Corseting on the Female Skeleton: A Preliminary Morphological Study” in NEXUS (Gibson, 2015), the understanding of corset-related change relied on faulty data from O’Followell’s book. Given that data from O’Followell were the only radiographic-image-based documentation of the phenomenon of corset-related skeletal changes from O’Followell’s time, it constituted the entire factual dataset from which one could draw conclusions about women who corseted prior to it. While other scholars of corseting in the late 1800s and early 1900s did provide images (see the iconic drawing in William Alcott’s [1837, 238] The House I Live In as well as similar drawings from the pamphlet The Corset: Questions of Pressure and Displacement by Dickinson [1887]), the physical manifestations of corset alteration are consid- erably less exaggerated than the drawings of the day; after all, it is quite easy to draw something and call it accurate, particularly if your audience is ignorant, trusting, or credulous, while in fact it is not accurate at all (see discussion below of hoaxes). I would like to note, however, that my subsequent publication of The Corseted Skeleton (Gibson 2020) critiqued O’Followell’s text but did not formally recognize his flaws, as discussed here. In 2015, and later in 2020, I adopted a critical view of the historical evidence of corset-related skeletal changes, conducting my own research on skeletal populations from St. Brides Parish, London, and the Musée de l’Homme, Paris—the aforementioned data required in order to success- fully develop a theory. The skeletal changes found in both populations—on women whom I could verify would have reasonably practiced long-term corseting—seemed consistent, at first glance, with drawings and radiographs from O’Followell’s book. However, I have subsequently undertaken a translation and annotation of Le Corset (forthcoming from Bloomsbury’s fashion history imprint under the title The Bad Corset: A Feminist Reimagin- ing), and in the course of said work, discovered that many of the radiographs used by O’Followell were manipulated to fool the viewer into a mistaken interpretation of the image. Below is an examination of two of these radiographs—which detail the evidence of falsification—to correct the inter- pretation of the image-based bioarchaeological record. Before I discuss them, however, a brief diversion into O’Followell’s influence on the subject of corseting. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2023 The Authors. American Anthropologist published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. Am. Anthropol. 2023;1–12. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/aman 1