Memorial to ‘bone setter’ a cemetery feature
The other day I was exploring the Old Town Cemetery with my pal and colleague Tam Rennie, cemeteries monumental technician team leader and all-round good egg, and talking about how to boost tourism.
Each year nearly 70,000 people visit the wonderful Church of the Holy Rude and are greeted by volunteers. The question is can we get them to spend more time in the cemetery and perhaps buy an ice cream, though of course we also need an ice cream stall.
We were also talking about our favourite gravestones in the cemetery andTam showed me his, and it’s pictured here.
The memorial is to Daniel Ferguson, a bone-setter, and it was erected by his grateful patients.
Just in case you didn’t know what a bone-setter was, there’s a cool depiction of a broken bone at the top of the memorial. And, yes, he mended broken bones and ensured that they healed in the correct way.
Daniel was a traditional healer with roots in the medieval Gaelic tradition. Before the NHS, doctors were dear and in a manual labouring economy with poor health and safety, physical injuries were common.
If that were not enough there is a great bronze profile sculpture of him set into the monument. If you peer at it close enough you will find that it was made by a Daniel Ferguson from Glasgow who in his time was a reasonably famous sculptor producing images for gravestones and even did the railings for his ancestor Rob Roy’s grave at Balquidder.
However, this appears to have been his only commission in Stirling. And no, those names are not a coincidence: the bone-setter was the uncle of the sculptor.
So why not head up to the cemetery and see if you can spot it.