This episode includes discussions of cracking joints, resetting broken bones by hand, and dislocation and relocation of joints.

If any of these are triggers for you, this may be a good episode to skip. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions

of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halley, and this is the

Morbid Curiosity podcast.

Thank you. Throughout history, there have been people who try to take advantage of vulnerable people.

From snake oil salesmen and beauticians pedaling poisons to quack doctors, it's all been done before,

over and over again in different guises. However, there are rare cases in which a fraudulent cure turns out to have a small amount of actual medical value. Today I'm going to talk about one of

these rare cases, bone setting, and the most

famous practitioner of the trade, Sarah Map, also known as Crazy Sal. Bone setting or

joint manipulation involves physically moving a bone or joint into or out of place as a form of medical treatment.

Bone setting has been practiced in different cultures all over the world for millennia.

The earliest known medical text, an ancient Egyptian papyrus from 1552 BC, known as the Edwin

Smith papyrus, describes the treatment of bone-related injuries, including

fractures, which often required setting. They identified breaks by feeling and listening for

crepitus, or the sound and feel of snapping and popping of bones moving against one another.

A fracture occurs when a bone is injured and breaks.

There are many types of fractures, most of which are quite obvious,

even to those without medical experience, due to a change in shape at the sight of the break and intense pain.

Displaced fractures, that is, fractures in which the broken ends of the

bone move out of alignment, require being set back into place for any chance of healing. This often

requires forceful movement of the bones back into anatomical position by a healer.

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