Biting nails is a disease that girls should be shamed out of doing

According to a school teacher in 1904, girls who bite their nails should be humiliated for doing so in front of others, particularly her classmates. The only way to stop the nail-biting “disease” is to harass the student and humiliate her as often as “necessary.”

Biting Nails a Disease

The head school teacher, who sat at the end of a row of six girls at a matinee, saw one of them take off her gloves as soon as the lights went down and the curtain went up. She watched. When the girl thought her teacher’s attention was concentrated on the stage one of her hands went to her lips.

“Miss Blank,” said the chaperon, leaning over and speaking so that everybody seated around her could hear, “I must ask you to stop biting your nails and put your gloves on immediately.”

The other girls tittered, and the particular one who had offended did as she was told, looking very much humiliated.

“Poor child,” said a sympathetic woman sitting in the row behind.

“I frequently find it necessary to administer a rebuke of this sort to girls with the nail-biting habit,” said the chaperon to a friend who asked about it. “All teachers do. A lesson of that sort is worth ten admonitions in private. There is no better way to break a pupil of a bad habit like biting the nails than to shame her out of it. I warned Miss Blank before we started for the theater that I should rebuke her if I caught her biting her nails, and she promised not to do it. When I saw her stealthily drawing off her gloves I knew what was coming. We have to watch girls with the nail-biting habit in church, in the theater, and everywhere they go in public. It is almost impossible to make them keep their gloves on.”

A fashionable manicure up town advertises to cure nail-biting. He says he has many patrons among girls and women.

“It is an exceptional thing to find a man who bites his nails,” he said to a reporter for The Sunday Press, “but I have known of some cases. Nail-biting is a disease, the same as itching scalp or anything of that sort. To a certain extent it is a habit, but the habit develops the disease, which is called onychopagie.

“When I was in Paris four years ago I first learned about the treatment for it, and at once introduced it in my business here. Far from being a harmless habit, resulting only in unsightly hands, nail-biting is a prolific cause of nervous disorders in girls and women. It requires various forms of treatment, according to the condition and surroundings of the victim. The best time to stop it is in childhood. Parents and school teachers who find children biting their nails should not only severely reprimand them, but punish them in a way that will be remembers. In my opinion the teacher you tell about gave the young woman a wholesome lesson.”

Source: The Montgomery advertiser. (Montgomery, Ala.), 14 Jan. 1904.