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

by George Matthews Bennett

The publication of Dr. Wharton Hood’s book had however a different effect on the public mind than what was intended. There was previously a sort of general belief that the doctors might be right in dubbing Bone-setters “quacks” without much discrimination as to who the bone-setter was. Some of the complaints which appeared in the Lancet prior to this, were like the petulant utterances of a child deprived of its plaything, rather than the opinions of a scientific inquirer, for it must have struck the thinking part of the faculty, as it subsequently did Sir James Paget, and gleamed on the writer in the Lancet, that the fame of the many cures could not have been the effect of chance, or the “luck” of ignorant charlatans. Mr. Archibald Maclaren, who noticed Dr. Hood’s book in Nature, seems to have been aware of this. He pertinently says with reference to his work On Bone-setting, “It will be asked, What is Bone-setting, who are the Bone-setters, and who are their patients? And it will be readily answered Why, of course, Bone-setting is the art of setting bones that have been broken, or joints that have been dislocated, and this is done doubtless by surgeons; and equally doubtless, and of course their patients are persons whose bones are fractured, or whose joints are dislocated—

“There needs no ghost come from

The grave to tell us that.”

Perhaps not, but the answer is quite wrong for all that; quite the reverse, indeed, of what is actually the case, for Bone-setting is NOT the art of re-setting broken bones or dislocated joints; Bone-setters are NOT surgeons, or regular practitioners in any sense of the title; and then patients, even when they have suffered injury to joint or bone, have been pronounced by the regular practitioner cured before seeking the help of the Bone-setter.”

The writer very properly calls this “a triple paradox,” and quotes what Dr. Hood has to say in explanation:—

“A healthy man sustains a fracture of one or both bones of the forearm, and applies at a hospital, where splints are adapted in the usual way. He is made an out-patient, and the splints are occasionally taken off and replaced.

“After the lapse of a certain number of weeks the fracture becomes firmly united, the splints are laid aside, and the man is discharged cured. He is still unable to use either his hand or his forearm, but is assured that his difficulty arises only from the stiffness incidental to long rest of them, and that it will soon disappear. Instead of disappearing, it rather increases, and in due time he seeks the aid of the Bone-setter. The arm and forearm are then bent nearly at a right angle to each other; the forearm is intermediate between pronation and supenation; the hand in a line with it; and the fingers straight and rigid, the patient being unable to move them, and also unable to move either the wrist or elbow. Passive motion can be accomplished within narrow limits, thus produces sharp pain, distinctly localised in some single spot about each joint, in which spot there will be also tenderness in pressure.

“The Bone-setter will tell the man that his wrist and his elbow are “out.” The man may object that the injury has been in the middle of the forearm, perhaps from a blow or other direct violence. The reply be then; perhaps the arm had indeed been broken as alleged, but that the wrist and the elbow had been put out at the same time, and that these injuries had been overlooked by the doctors. The Bone-setters would then, by a rapid manipulation hereafter to be described, at once overcome the stiffness of the fingers, and enabled the patient to move them to and fro. The instant benefit received would dispel all scruples about submitting the wrist and elbow to manipulation, and these also would be set free in their turn. The man would go away easily flexing and extending his lately rigid joints, and fully convinced that he had sustained grievous harm at the hands of his legitimate doctors.”

“The art of Bone-setting, then, is the art of overcoming these impediments in joints, these conditions or impaired freedom which not unfrequently supervene on the curative processes of treatment in use by surgeons in case of fracture or dislocation, or which may arise from and be observed only after the subsidence of active rheumatism, gout, gangrene swellings, or other local affections; and this brings us to the question—How is it done? how are these stiffened joints set free? how are these impediments to healthy action overcome? The answer of the regular practitioner is that which has been already quoted, namely—‘to rest it’—advice which usually entails a distressing failure; the answer of the irregular practitioner, i.e., the Bone-setter, is precisely the opposite, namely—that freedom can only be restored to the stiffened joint by movement, by manipulation, and manipulation, too, of the most formidable kind, nothing less than suddenly and forcibly rupturing, tearing asunder the adhesions formed between the articulating surfaces of the affected joint, an operation which is so frequently successful that it forms the very basis of the Bone-setter’s craft.”

This is very forcibly and clearly expressed, but its verbiage tends somewhat to place the Bone-setter in a formidable and forbidding light, as opposed to the regular practitioner, but as a matter of every-day experience such is not the case. It is true, that the injury of years cannot be removed in a twinkle of an eye, without the patient suffering any pain or inconvenience. No bone-setter pretends to do that, but his mode of procedure is not of that violent and repellant character which Mr. Maclaren’s words would seem to imply:—

“It is here,” continues Mr. Maclaren, “that the Bone-setter steps in front of the scientific surgeon, and we must confess to a feeling of disappointment that their relative positions are not reversed, that the surgeon is not called in to rectify the malpractices of the quack, instead of the latter being sought out to complete the shortcomings of the former.” These are not our words, but the words of an independent reviewer in a scientific periodical. He tells his readers that the Bone-setter is not a man with only one remedy and one resource, but that “he has a clearly defined system of treatment for each separate joint, if not for each specific affection to which each joint is subject.” What qualified surgeon, what regular practitioner has more than that? He follows the dogma and doctrine of the schools. The Bone-setter that of experience, practice and the traditions of generations of practitioners. The one is recognised by law, and the other is not.