James Gillray's cartoon Metallic Tractors, published in 1801, portrays Benjamin Perkins treating a boil on the nose of an alcoholic John Bull with a pair of metallic tractors. The tractors had been invented by his father, Elisha Perkins of Connecticut, and were supposed to relieve pain and other symptoms through the agency of animal magnetism. The tractors were revealed as nothing more than an expensive sham by Dr John Haygarth in Bath, who showed that wooden tractors were equally effective. Thus, he was one of the first to use a placebo in a single-blind clinical trial.
References
1.
Courtesy of the Royal College of Physicians of London. An excellent example of this print is held in the iconographic collections of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London. Roy Porter included this print in Bodies Politic. Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900.London: Reaktion Books, 2001: plate 49.
2.
ThorntonJL. Charles Hunnings Wilkinson. Annals of Science1967; 23:198–202.
3.
PerkinsHT Elisha. Dictionary of American Biography, vol. XIV, pp. 466–7.
4.
BishopWJ.Elisha Perkins and his metallic tractors. British Journal of Rheumatic Diseases1939; 1:193–206. This excellent article, by a distinguished librarian, is comprehensive and the best account of the metallic tractor affair.
5.
PerkinsB.The Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body be …. London: J Johnson and Ogilvy and Son, 1798.
6.
LangworthyCC.A View of Perkinian electricity, or, an enquiry into the influence of metallic tractors founded on a newly-discovered principle in nature, and employed as a remedy in many painful inflammatory disorders be …. Bath: R Crutwell, 1798.
7.
WeaverGHHaygarthJohn. Clinician, statistician, investigator, apostle of sanitation. Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago1930; 4:156–200. See also LoboFM. John Haygarth, smallpox and religious dissent in eighteenth century England. In: CunninghamAFrenchR, eds. The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990: pp. 217–53. This prize-winning essay is the best contemporary account of John Haygarth.
8.
BoothCC. John Dawson (1734–1820). British Medical Journal1970; 4:171–3.
9.
LoboFM (op. cit. ref. 7).
10.
FoxRH.Dr John Fothergill and his Friends.London: Macmillan and Co, 1919.
11.
BalderstoneKC, ed. The Diary of Mrs Hester Thrale.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942: pp. 847 and 931.
12.
HaygarthJ.Observations on the population and diseases of Chester. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London1778; 66:151.
13.
FalconerW.A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body. Being the Essay to Which the Fothergillian Medal was Adjudged.London: C Dilly and T Phillips, 1788. This work went though four editions.
14.
HaygarthJ.On the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disease of the Body Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors and Epidemical Convulsions.Bath: R Crutwell, 1800.
15.
LawrenceCLucierPBoothCC.’Take Time by the Forelock.’ The Letters of Anthony Fothergill to James Woodforde, 1789–1813. Medical History, Supplement No. 17, 1997: p. 78.
16.
MS autograph letter, John Haygarth to his publishers Cadell and Davies, dated Bath 6 January 1800. By permission of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London.
17.
Anon. Gentleman's Magazine March 1800: vol. 70, p. 253.
18.
PerkinsBD.New Cases of Practice with Perkins Metallic Tractors, on the Human Body and on Animals; But Especially on Infants and Horses, Chiefly from the Medical and Clerical Professions, With a Confrontation of Every Attack Upon the Metallic Practice…. London: J Johnson, 1802.
19.
CorryJ.The Detection of Quackery; or, Analysis of Medical, Philosophical, Political, Dramatic, and Literary Imposture.London: B Crosby, 1802.
20.
WilliamsC.The Tractors be … London, 1802. A print of this cartoon is held in the iconographic collections of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London. This print is also included in Porter R (op. cit. ref. 1): plate 50. Porter identifies the lady as a Mrs Thicknesse, who notoriously quarrelled with her husband in public.
21.
PerkinsBD.The efficacy of Perkins Metallic Tractors on the human body and animals … to which is prefixed a preliminary discourse, in which, the fallacious attempts of Dr Haygarth to detract from the merits of the tractors, are detected and fully confuted.London: J Johnson, 1800.
22.
BishopWJ (op. cit. ref. 3).
23.
CausticC, MD LID (TG Fessenden). A Poetic Petition against Tractorian Trumpery, and the Perkinian Institution, in four Cantos … addressed to the Royal College of Physicians. London: T Hurst and J Ginger, 1802.
24.
WeaverGHHaygarthJohn. Portrait, letter and descendants. Bulletin of the Society for Medical History of Chicago1928–36; 4:264–7.
