SILHOUETTES OF STRANGE WOMEN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17012, 10 April 1923, Page 6

SILHOUETTES OF STRANGE WOMEN.

MRS MAPP, BONE-SETTER AND SHAPE-MISTRESS. STRANGELY FICTURESQUE FIGURE. The “ Star ” has made arrangements for the publication of a series of articles entitled “ Silhouettes of Strange Women." The articles give authentic and entertaining accounts of the careers of oertain women who earned more than temporary or local celebrity. (Written for the “ Star ” by V. METHLEY. 11. It was in the days of good Queen Anne that a very strange woman might have been seen, plodding through the lanes of Wiltshire and Somerset. Rag ged and unkempt, with tangled hair, this scarecrow figure was known to the West Country rustics as “ Crazy Sally.” She inspired something of tear —and something, too, of 303' and relief, when there was one in the village who needed her help. For Sarah Wallis was known through two counties and more as a “Shape-Mistress,” or Bone-setter.

She was built for it by nature: al though not tall, her shoulders were enormously broad, her arms ape-like and terminating in huge, muscular hands. Moreover, she had earned something or what we now’ call ‘'manipulative surgery ” from her father, who practised a bone-setter in Hindon, a remote Wiltshire village. Father and daughter could not wore together. After a furious quarrel, Sally left Hindoo and took to her wandering life, paid for her services sometimes iti money, more often in food and lodging. A very rough, if extremely ready thing was Sally’s surgery. She had practically no knowledge of anatomy or medicine, and relied only upon her brute*strAgth and her entire self-reli-ance and lack of nerves. She would seize a badly broken limb in those huge hands, wrench apart ill set bones, break down lesions and tissue, manipulate immovable joints—all the time laughing at her own coarse jests, whilst the helpless victims writhed in pain. Blit she worked through that extraordinary, inexplicable instinct which some bone-setters seem to possess, and in a great number of cases the apparently brutal operation was a success. The lame walked ; the use of apparently powerless limbs was recovered—aud Crazy Sally’s fame spread far beyond the bounds of Wiltshire.

Slje received requests for help from other parts of England, and. finally, some such message brought her to London. Perhaps, too, Sally wanted to see an already famous sister of hers, for she stood in this relationship to Mary Warren. otherwise known as Polly Peachura. a noted comic actress or those days, who was tried for bigamy at the Old Baily six years later. But Crazy Sally needed no relations to help her. She was t-o make her own reputation in London, and in a manner little short of marvellous. The queer, unkempt woman, already approaching middle-age, took a small room in a squalid neighbourhood. She put- advertisements in the papers, and began to practice her healing art with the strange mixture of savagery and salving which made her famous. For famous she became in a few short months. Surgery was backward in those days, and even the most famous doctors were what we should consider grossly ignorant. and. of course, lacking in any kind of anaesthetic, which made operations a terrible business. Moreover, there was plenty of material to Sally’s hands in the shape of the wounded and maimed men who thronged the streets —the aftermath of the campaigns of Marlborough, often crippled for lack of ordinary care. Sarah Wallis had plenty of patients. She began to make money more and more rapidly, as her fame spread up wards to the higher regions of society, and elegant chariots and gilded sedan chairs swung along the dirty, cobbled street to the door of the Shape-Mis-tress. And, although a certain proportion went away unhealed, and not a few were made far worse by her remorseless handling, Sally Wallis effected quite enough cures to establish for herself an enormous reputation. She left her cheap rooms and took a house at Epsom, where she lived m comfort and ever-growing luxury. Probably her most unwise action was when

she married, on August 11, 1736, a man called Hill Mapp, who was footman to a certain mercer, one Tbbet-son, of Ludgate Hill. Mapp was a handsome, wellmade young fellow, many years young er than the Bone-eefcter, and attracted, as it would appear, solely by her fame and her money. It was an evil day for Sally Wallis when she married him, for all the infatuation was on her side. Only a month after the wedding, Mapp ran away, taking with him all the money in the house, about a. hundred and one guineas. However, he returned to his goose of the golden eggs a few weeks later and, as the journals of the day cell us, was “ kindly received.” Poor Sally Mapp! But her fame increased. In this same year of 1736, it reached its climax and we find constant icferences to Mrs Mapp in the “ Gentleman’s Magazine.” “ The Grub Street Journal,” “ Mist’s Journal ” and the other leading newsheetfc of the day. She set up a chariot with four horses, and once a wok drove in from Epsom to London iii great style, with livened footmen, going to the Grecian Coffee house, where she received her patients, and performed those cures, in bone-setting and manipulation, which seem to haw?' been rightly described as On October 21. 1736. we read that Mrs Mapp performed several operations in the presence of Sir Harry Sloane (th ' anil,us Physician and the “godfather” •oi Sloane Square and Sloane Street), particularly one upon a niece of Sir Hans, which was greatly to his satisfaction and the credit of the Shapemistress. This girl had had her sboulderbone out of joint for nine years, and Mrs Mapp put- it entiiely to rights in ae many minutes.

The other patients on this occasion —who were both cured—were *. man of Wardour Street, whose neck had been broken nine years before, and whbse vertebrae protruded two inches, and a gentleman who wore a shop six inches high, having been lame through hipdisease for twenty .years. This limb Mrs Mapp set- straight and brought down the leg oven with the other. After these and other operations. Mrs Mapp would drive back to Epsom, carrying with her the patients’ crutches and sticks, which idle called ‘ trophies of honour.” Verses were addressed to. the Bone-