Mr. Hulke thought it was an approbrium to surgery that so many persons sought advice from Bone-setters, and he mentioned that “even intelligent people are blinded by these men!” Many alleged instances of injury following the treatment of the Bone-setter, but there was a little contemptuous tone with respect to country surgeons, which ere long evoked a reply.
In the next number of the _Lancet_, there appeared a letter from Dr. D. H. Monckton, of Rugeley, pointing out that it would seem “that the chief object sought in the debate was to prove to country surgeons that their metropolitan brethren understand, and can cure such conditions of the joints if only they are sent up to them.” In other words, they want to occupy the place and receive the fees of the ousted Bone-setters, whose secrets they had appropriated, after covering them with approbrium as quacks and empirics.
At another meeting of the profession there was the same _pro_ and _con_ argumentation. The obvious “willingness to wound,” but yet “afraid to strike” in the face of the overwhelming testimony in favour of the _bete noir_ of the profession:—the healer outside the fold “who in the wilderness doth stray.” At this meeting Dr. Bruce Clarke read a paper on the practice of the Bone-setter, in which after briefly alluding to the variety of cases that found their way to the Bone-setter, and derived benefits from his treatment, he adverted to the pathology of stiff joints, and showed from observations of several cases which he had been able to examine after removal of the limb, that adhesions were usually found outside joints and tendon sheaths, and were due to contractions of the connective tissue of the limb. Adhesions were rarely formed inside the tendon sheaths or joints, and when they were, the disease was far more serious and rarely yielded to treatment. In cases of old stiff joints, the skin, and probably the subcutaneous tissues, became weakened and atrophied by disease, and were so rendered more liable to injury—in proof of which he cited several examples of tearing and lacerating the skin without the employment of due violence. The usual history, he tells us, of the class of cases that came under the hands of the Bone-setter was this:—