Dr. Howard Marsh, the learned Editor of Sir James Paget’s Lectures, who had previously been subjected to the criticism of country practitioners for his somewhat supercilious allusion to their failure to adopt the processes of the Bone-setter, thought it becoming at the jubilee meeting of the British Medical Association at Worcester in 1882, to resume the worn-out sneer at the Bone-setter’s ignorance and superstition. He seems, indeed, to have drawn on his imagination for his facts, or to have resuscitated the history of his own profession for that of the modern Bone-setter. From his high and mighty stand-point he told the assembled medical practitioners in the “faithful city” this faithless story:— “Bone-setters are a very miscellaneous group, who resemble each other mainly in the negative point, that they have never studied either anatomy, pathology, or surgery. Some are blacksmiths on the Cumberland hills, or shepherds in the sequestered valleys of Wales. Practitioners of this kind, standing in the same relation to surgery that herbalists bear to medicine, have existed in these remote districts from immemorial times. They belong to the same order which in bye-gone times included fortune-tellers, ring-charmers, and the workers of all kind of village miracles. At the other end of the scale are practitioners of a less unsophisticated stamp. Residing in large towns they equip themselves with the names of the principal bones and muscles, and with a few stock medical phrases they procure a skeleton on which they undertake to show patients the precise nature of their complaints; they employ anæsthetics freely, and make full use of daily passive movements, rubbing and shampooing; while in spinal cases they often put on Sayre’s plaster jacket. These individuals however, are in the same position as the most homely of their order in this important particular—that diagnosis, properly so called, forms no part of their system. Indeed, diagnosis and their method are two things incompatible. At present, the Bone-setter’s programme is both concise and logical. In every case alike he asserts that “a bone is out,” and that he can put it in. Now, the second clause of this formula postulates the first. But let him once enter upon diagnosis—let him once find, not that a bone is out, but that the case is one of tumour, or paralysis, and he has cut the ground from under his own feet. No. Beyond the assertion that “a bone is out” or similar phrase, he never goes. If pressed for particulars, he cuts the knot by saying, “I can cure you—what more do you want?” Old Mr. Hutton, of Watford, used to say, “Don’t bother me with anatomy—I know nothing about it.” A patient, therefore, who consults a Bone-setter, is simply playing a game of hazard. His fate depends on what is the matter with him. If he has a stiff ankle after a sprain he will very likely be cured. If he has a strumous joint he will be more or less injured, while if he has a bunion, or a node on his