Page:Quackery Unmasked.djvu/250

246 Job Sweet, the original ancestor of this family of Bone-setters, as I have said before, was an illiterate man. At the time when he commenced bone-setting in South Kingston, the town must have been thinly inhabited—probably its physicians had not much knowledge of anatomy and no great skill in surgery, and might not be much better qualified to operate in cases of fracture or dislocation, than unprofessional men guided alone by their own common sense. Under such circumstances, the original operator may sometimes have reduced dislocations, and have become in his time the best Bone-setter in all that region.

The history of the Sweets is essentially the history of all professed Bone-setters, and will answer, mutatis mutandis, for various other names and places. Their operations are of the hocus pocus kind, and the deception is generally tangible, and may be shown by ocular demonstration. Yet notwithstanding all this, the masses shut their eyes and stop their ears against any exposure of the ignorance or fraud of this class of impostors. I am told that the Sweets have gained a wide reputation, and that many