The Art of the Bone-Setter: A Testimony and a Vindication

by George Matthews Bennett

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.

Throughout the medical publications from 1871 to 1880, there are frequent allusions to the bone-setter and several admissions by surgical practitioners,[5] that they have followed the method of the bone-setter with success, and discarded therefore the teaching of the schools; for though the Lancet itself welcomed Dr. Wharton Hood’s exposition of the art of the Bone-setter, as tending “to afford the means for the suppression of a widely prevalent and very mischievous form of quackery which has been based, as every success of the kind must be upon some neglected or forgotten truth. The late Mr. Hutton, on whose practise, Dr. Wharton Hood’s papers are founded, was for many years a sort of bugbear to not a few of the most distinguished surgeons of London, and every few months some fresh case was heard of in which he had given immediate relief and speedy cure to a patient who seemed vainly to have exhausted the legitimate skill of the metropolis.” This is an admission somewhat at variance with its previous utterances, and not as frank as the organ of a boasted liberal profession should be, and is far from generous, for its tone is embittered.

It however goes on to say, that “in some country places and especially in mining districts, in which large labouring populations are much exposed to chances of injury, bone-setters become formidable opponents to regular practitioners, and, like their London representative, have their surprising cures to boast. It is true that they often inflict injury; but this is not the aspect of the case to which our attention should be first directed. They are not valued because they do harm, but because they do a certain amount of good; and the way in which this good is brought about is the matter of chief interest to the profession.” The Lancet goes on to say “that quackery is only an expression of the extent to which legitimate practitioners fail to meet the desires of the sick,” and then somewhat unfairly and unjustly introduces the quack who pretends to cure phthisis or other mortal illness, as if Bone-setters professed impossibilities. After this inconsistent divergence it points out “that in the particular in question (the art of the Bone-setter) it is incontestible that a large number of irritable and useless joints have been restored to a natural condition by Bone-setters after a long period of unavailing surgical treatment, and that the profession has not known how this desirable result has been produced, or what has been the true nature of the lesion treated. The quack always said that a bone was “out” and that he had replaced it, and the doctor knew quite well that these statements were not correct. The doctor would not meet the quack; and the quack kept his methods secret, and would not show them to the doctor. The quack obtained more credit for a cure after the doctor had failed, than the doctor for a hundred cures in an ordinary course; and the Bone-setter, of all quacks was the one who did most to injure the reputation of the profession.

We once heard a military man of considerable distinction describe how his son was instantly cured of a sprained knee by Hutton, after a distinguished hospital surgeon had treated him to no purpose; and the speaker wound up with the remark ‘you doctors are all duffers.’

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“At all events, for good or evil, the treatment pursued by Bone-setters will now be fairly before the profession and scientifically educated surgeons will soon be in a position to define accurately its merits, its dangers, and the limitations of its usefulness. Its application by ignorant men to unsuitable cases has often been followed by injurious consequences; but no such consequences ought to occur in the hands of the profession. We have little doubt that Dr. Wharton Hood has really called attention to a neglected corner of the domain of surgery, to morbid conditions that have been only very faintly described in books, and scarcely at all recognised in practice, to precautions that have been either unfounded or exaggerated, and to a method of cure at once simple and intelligible. We hope to see as the result of his labour, that the art of the Bone-setters will become extinct, after having been for a time exercised only upon those cases for which treatment by movement would be really unsuitable, and, as a necessary consequence, hurtful instead of curative.

“There may be other forms of quackery also under which some valuable knowledge may lie concealed; and no better service can be rendered to the profession or the public than to bring quack knowledge to the light of day, and to make it available for the general good.”