Yet this is a disease that Osteopathy of the specific-adjustment, bone-setting, nerve-inhibiting brand has little beneficial effect upon. All the Osteopathic treatments I ever gave or saw given in cases of rheumatism that really did any good, were long, laborious massages. The medical man who as "professor" in an Osteopathic college said, "When the Osteopath with his _vast_ knowledge of anatomy gets hold of a case of torticollis he inhibits the nerves and cures it in five minutes," was talking driveling rot. I have seen some of the best Osteopaths treat wry-neck, and the work they did was to knead and stretch and pull, which by starting circulation and working out soreness, gradually relieved the patient. A hot application, by expanding tissues and stimulating circulation, would have had the same effect, perhaps more slowly manifested. To call any Osteopathic treatment massage is always resented as an insult by the guardians of the science. What is the Osteopath doing, who rolls and twists and pulls and kneads for a full hour, if he isn't giving a massage treatment? Of course, it sounds more dignified, and perhaps helps to "preserve the purity of Osteopathy as a separate system," to call it "reducing subluxations," "correcting lesions," "inhibiting and stimulating" nerves. The treatment also acts better as a placebo to call it by these names. As students we were taught that all Osteopathic movements were primarily to adjust something. Some of us worried for fear we wouldn't know when the adjusting was complete. We were told that all the movements we were taught to make were potent to "move things," so we worried again for fear we might move something in the wrong direction. We were assured, however, that since the tendency was always toward the normal, all we had to do was to agitate, stir things up a bit, and the thing out of place would find its place. How _specific_! How scientific! We were told that when in the midst of our "agitation" we heard something "pop," we could be sure the thing out of place had gone back. When a student had so mastered the great bone-setting science as to be able to "pop" stray cervical vertebrae he was looked upon with envy by the fellows who had not joined the association for protection against suits for malpractice, and did not know just how much of an owl they could make of a man and not break his neck. The fellow who lacked clairvoyant powers to locate straying things, and could not always find the "missing link" of the spine, could go through the prescribed motions just the same. If he could do it with sufficient facial contortions to indicate supreme physical exertion, and at the same time preserve the look of serious gravity and professional importance of a quack medical doctor giving _particular_ directions for the dosing of the placebo he is leaving, he might manage to make a sound vertebra "pop." This, with his big show of doing something, has its effect on the patient's mind anyway.