Social Histories of Disability and Deformity by David M. Turner

Author:David M. Turner [Turner, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134235582
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2006-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

From ‘deformity’ to science

David Le Vay has identified three roots for the treatment of orthopaedic conditions: bone-setting, truss-making, and medical orthopaedics. As well as dealing with the obvious business of fractures and dislocations, bonesetters handled patients with club foot and other ‘deformities’ for whom truss-makers also crafted appliances. In contrast to this diverse multitude of practitioners, medical orthopaedics had one trailbreaker: Dr Robert Chessher (1750–1831) from Hinkley in Leicestershire whose patients, according to the Gentleman's Magazine of 1810, ‘were loud in his praise for the benefits which they had received … after they had vainly tried all other means’.4 But, however gifted, Chessher's use of ‘friction, massage, motion and splintage’ and his construction of ‘machines’ to correct ‘deformities’ were almost without parallel among ‘regular’ practitioners who, in orthopaedic matters, typically deferred to ‘irregular’ bonesetters and truss-makers. Though the Medical Act of 1858 outlawed such collaboration, the ‘irregulars’ were themselves beginning to discern the advantages of professional recognition.5 Therefore, Hugh Owen Thomas (1834–1891) – a descendant of the legendary bonesetter, Evan Thomas, who as a child in the mid-1700s was shipwrecked on the rocky north Wales coast – attended Edinburgh University, qualified at University College Hospital, London, and spent a short time studying French surgery in Paris.6

Medical orthopaedists like Hugh Owen Thomas brought together their ‘hereditary craft with the knowledge gained in the medical schools’,7 but mainstream medicine was also developing a surgical response to broken bones and damaged muscles. General voluntary hospitals – a creation of the early eighteenth century – were already providing artificial legs for patients whose limbs had been amputated, in addition to opening orthopaedic departments and purchasing equipment to meet orthopaedic needs.8 In 1817, however, the first hospital dedicated to orthopaedics was established in Birmingham for ‘the relief of Persons labouring under Bodily Deformity’. Although ‘spinal diseases’ and ‘contractions and distortions of the limbs’ were treated, the management of clubfoot was especially promoted. Every year there were 50 children born in the town with club-feet, the annual general meeting of 1862 was told:

Each one costs in instruments alone, £2 and requires almost constant attention for at least a year. But this year we will send forth 50 human beings who instead of being cripples will, in the majority of cases have no evidences of their deformity remaining.9

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