“Learn, then, to imitate what is good, and avoid what is bad in the
practice of Bone-setters; and if you would still further observe the
rule, _Fas est ab hoste doceri_, which in no calling is wiser than
in ours, learn next what you can from the practice of rubbers and
plasterers; for these know many clever tricks; and if they had but
educated brains to guide their strong and pliant hands, they might be
most skilful curers of bad joints, and of many other hindrances of
locomotion.”
Such is in brief the testimony of the great Master-Surgeon of the
age to the methods of practice adopted by the Bone-setters, who have
practised their art as their fathers and grandfathers have done before
them. His testimony at least shows that the Bone-setter works on truly
scientific grounds, and that he is not a mere “lucky trickster,”
a charlatan who works on the credulity of the public for the sake
of gain, pretending to cure others by his own conceit. As I have
before pointed out, Sir James Paget himself had occasion to modify
his originally expressed opinion when the process and mode of cure
practised by the late Mr. Richard Hutton was explained by Dr. Wharton
Hood.
To this gentleman the profession and the public were indebted for
the first published authoritative account of the Bone-setter’s
art. There are but few Bone-setters who will say that Dr. Hood has
exhausted the subject, for he has not; he has only indicated a few
salient points, in which the practice of Mr. Hutton varied materially
from that taught in surgical schools. He showed that more might be
done in the surgical world by the leverage of the limbs, than by the
employment of complicated and expensive apparatus. He bemoaned the
“cost and loss” which the practitioners of surgery have sustained by
the resort of patients, affected by impaired mobility or usefulness of
limbs, after disease or injury to the Bone-setters, who so frequently
give relief and speedily cure a patient by their manipulations and
treatment. It is but just to Dr. Hood to say that he has given a
number of cases illustrative of his statements, which the faculty have
“condescended” to notice, and some of which, in my desire to give the
widest illustrations of the usefulness of the Bone-setter’s art, I
have embodied in this treatise. He dwells somewhat on the supposition
that all Bone-setters declare that “a bone is out” in every case of
thickened or stiff joint that is brought to them, but he seems to
forget that these are only a fraction of the “cases which Bone-setters
cure,” and on which our reputation so securely rests. The quarry men
of North Wales, as detailed in the _British Medical Journal_, in 1875,
preferred Mr. Thomas Evans, of Pen-y-groes, to their old regular
medical practitioner in cases of external injury to body or limb,
and though the profession were indignant at any medical men, being
associated with a mere Bone-setter in the rules of Friendly Society or
Sick Club, the connection is not unfrequent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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