Lest it should be thought that I have only my own authority for calling
in question Dr. Howard Marsh’s dogmatic assertions with respect to the
method of practice by modern Bone-setters I find at the same medical
jubilee, Mr. R. Dacre Fox, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons,
of Edinburgh, the surgeon to the Southern Hospital, Manchester;
surgeon to the Manchester police force, and whose other practice and
official appointments entitle his opinion to some weight, gave his
practical experience of the Bone-setter’s art, so entirely different
and so much nearer the truth, that I shall content myself with merely
quoting, whilst thanking him, for his remarks which appeared in the
_Lancet_, for 1882 (vol. ii. pp. 844.) Speaking from three years’
experience with the late Mr. Taylor, a celebrated bone-setter at
Whitworth, Lancashire, whose family have been bone-setters for more
than two hundred years, he told the medical men in plain terms that,
“Much misconception exists as to the practice of Bone-setters; many
of the methods of treatment popularly attributed to them have no
other existence than in the imagination of ignorant patients, whose
stories we, as a profession, are perhaps rather too ready to believe.
It is certain that some families—notably the Taylors, Huttons, and
Masons—have by their manipulative and mechanical skill justly acquired
a great reputation. In what has their practice consisted? First, in
the treatment of fractures and correction of deformities. The general
impression in the profession appears to be that the Bone-setter’s art
consists of nothing more or less than the forcible “breaking up” of
stiff joints, so as to make the same man walk as if by a miracle. The
practice at Whitworth was a large one, furnishing constant employment
for at least two active men, and consisting chiefly of the cases I have
mentioned. Speaking from memory, I do not believe that fifty joints of
all sorts were “cracked up” during the time I was there; but it was
not an uncommon event to have to put up half a dozen fresh fractures
and twice as many recent sprains in a single morning. In the North
of England, the origin of nearly all the men who are fairly good at
Bone-setting can be traced to the Whitworth surgery, and while, so far
as I know, the Taylors, in their various settlements at Whitworth,
Todmorden, Stock-wood, and Oldfield-lane, were the only qualified
surgeons who practised Bone-setting; amongst the hills and dales of
Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Lake district, there were many who did
so without being qualified, some of whom, I must in fairness say, put
up fractures uncommonly well. But apart from the legitimate credit they
have won by the skill displayed in their handicraft, they owe some of
their success to the carelessness or indifference of the general body
of practitioners, who are apt to overlook little injuries which often
become very painful and troublesome. It sometimes seems to me that
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