A visit to the Bonesetter

One day when I was about Eleveno twelve the telephone rang and I ran to answer it and I caught my leg in the carpet and fell down the stares , landing on my wrist. It looked broken, hurt badly, and swelled immediately. My mother took me to the bazaar to see the machd Habib, the bone-setter. He had a pottery shop in the potters section where he sold ceramics from his native Hamadan in the northwest of Persia: Bowles, jugs, plates, tiles, crockery of all sorts. They were earthenware, or glazed with ornamental patterns, above all of the famous turquoise blue in his region.

 Bone setting was his hobby and he was so skilled that his reputation had spread far beyond the bazaar even when a broken bone was broken into many pieces he could make it whole again. He practiced his skills on broken pottery. He use to break a jug into a dozen pieces, put them in a sack, and from the outside manipulated the pieces into place like a jigsaw puzzle!

Mashdi Habib was sitting on a stool outside his shop when we arrived. On seeing us, he got up, Bowed courteously and motioned us inside. With infinite gentleness he manipulated my wrist and said that it is not broken but only slightly cracked and that he could soon put it right. He took some warm ashes from the brazier and poured them into a cotton bag, then wrap the bag around my waist. If the bone had been broken he would have get kept it motionless by putting it between two strips of wood, after manipulating it into place and covering it with hot ashes. He then tore piece of rag  from a sheet and made me a sling, saying:“ keep it still for a couple of days. In a week your wrist will be as good as new!”

A whole chapter could be written on the use of ashes in precious traditional folk- medicine: they are the antiseptic of the poor even today. Before antibiotic penicillin was easy available, ashes were used to treat cuts, sterilize wounds, ease rheumatic pain and much more. Alas, Mashdi Habib and the other Bonesetter's are eventually disappeared with the development of the modern methods of surgery and plastering and dealing with broken bones.