Mr. Maclaren seems to have seen that there was something which required explanation in all this. With the facts in Dr. Hood’s book before him, he says “Bone-setters, we are told, are for the most part uneducated men, wholely ignorant of anatomy and pathology.” In the anecdotes of Mr. Hutton, this is always accentuated in the professional accounts of his proceedings, for he made a little boast of his ignorance, but the writer continues, “we are not told what we greatly wish to know, and that is, the manner and method in which the secrets, the mysteries, and the other traditions of the craft, are communicated to each other.[6] No doubt there exists a freemasonry in the craft, so that when individual members meet, revelations are made and notes compared, but we are not informed of any regular or organised system of instruction, either for the maintenance and extension of the craft, as a craft, or for the enlightenment of the separate and detached members of the fraternity. The most celebrated, we may even say distinguished,[7] Bone-setter of our day, was the late Mr. Hutton, whose successful treatment of cases which had baffled the skill of the foremost surgeons now living, as related in detail by Dr. Hood, and about the accuracy of which there can be no question or doubt, is little short of marvellous; and the question is ever recurrent, while we read ‘How and where was this skill acquired?’ for a Bone-setter of Mr. Hutton’s calibre could put his finger on the spot, where lurked the seat of an affection that had crippled a patient for half a dozen years, and had defied the scientific treatment of the ablest surgeons of our time; nay, he could point to this spot without ever seeing the limb affected, guided merely by observing the attitude, gait, or action of the patient. Now whence comes this skill of these illiterate men? It appears to have been gained solely by observation of symptoms and results of treatment, the accumulated knowledge of from day-to-day experience; and, as we often see that one sense is quickened and functional power increased by the loss or impairment of some other sense; so, perhaps, the narrowing of the field of instruction and counting of the sources of information, may have intensified the powers of observation of the Bone-setters, allowing in a measure for the absence of the revelations of science.”
Is not this equally applicable to the oculist, the aurist, the dentist, and to the “specialist” of every description. The Bone-setter keeps within his special knowledge, and though he may be called “a quack,” he can point to the results of his skill and experience, and ask if these are quackery? The patients, whose sufferings have been alleviated, must answer, “If this is quackery, we wish there was more of it in the world.”
CHAPTER V.
THE FACULTY IN DOUBT.
“Why, what have you observed, sir, seems so impossible.”—Ben Jonson.
Like the Royal Society, when Charles II. asked that learned body the answer to certain propositions, the medical profession continued for years to “hum and haw” over the self-evident fact that Bone-setting was not only an institution, but a successful profession. I have taken somewhat at random from my voluminous collection of notes on the subject, a few of the printed opinions of those “who were convinced against their will,” but could not “be of the same opinion still,” but wished to modify the self-evident facts or gloss them over to harmonise with previously expressed declarations.
