“From this you may see,” says Sir James, “that the cases that the Bone-setters may cure are not a few, but,” he continues, “the _lessons which you may learn from their practice are plain and useful_. Many more cases of injured joints than one commonly supposed to be thus curable may be successfully treated with rough movements.”
“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. The faculty have evidently much to learn ere they can successfully compete with Bone-setters in the special cases to which they devote their time, abilities and attention. The patients are the best judges of results, and by results the surgeon must be judged. Their case is not helped by detailing how a Chinese farrier killed a girl the Emperor desired to marry, by forcibly straightening her hump-back, as recorded in page 900 of the _Lancet_ for 1872. It is far better for them to admit as Dr. G. Reed admitted in the same journal that he “had his eye wiped” by a Bone-setter, at Liverpool, who cured a sailor whom he failed to relieve.