The Spectre looks as though he's wearing a truss. I remember, as a child, reading the ads in the back pages of Railroad Magazine, which my dad used to buy, and seeing ads for trusses and not quite understanding what they were for. I just googled for "hernia truss" and, while I found no images of ads of the sort I remember, I did find this marvelous parody site. The drawings are just like those I recall, and might have been scanned from one of those ads.