Perkins, Elisha (1741–1799)
Elisha Perkins, son of Dr. Joseph Perkins, was born in Norwich, Connecticut, January 16, 1741. He was the apostle of one of those epochs of credulity which seize men from time to time when any exceedingly novel cure is proclaimed. The terms, "Perkinism," "Tractorism," were known both in America and abroad and the wonderful metallic rods which Perkins said and believed to be curative of almost every ill in men (and horses) certainly wrought psychotherapeutic wonders.
Perkins himself was a magnetic person, handsome, over six feet tall, of wonderful endurance and self-control. He was educated by his father. He had felt a curious magnetic power in himself in touching anyone and set about finding some combination of metals which might have the same effect in healing disease. These he found in 1796 and named "tractors," two small rods, about three inches long, one of brass, one of steel, which had to be drawn downward for twenty minutes over the affected parts. A patent was obtained; doctors and philosophers gravely approved, and professors of three American universities said they believed in Perkinism. The tractors came to be used in Copenhagen where twelve well-known physicians reported so favorably on them that the records were printed in an octavo volume. In 1803 Benjamin Perkins, the son, established the Perkinean Institution in London with the Right Hon. Lord Rivers as president and Sir William Barker as vice-president, and five thousand cases were treated. There is reason to think Elisha Perkins was self-deceived or really perceived the real efficacy to lie in the imagination and so kept up the outward therapeutic symbols. An imaginative, restless, inquiring man, he introduced another remedy for dysentery and low fever "consisting of the vegetable with the muriatic acid in the form of common vinegar saturated with muriate of soda." Believing this to be antiseptic in yellow fever he went to New York during the epidemic in 1799, and after four weeks' unremitting care of the sick he fell ill of the fever and died, aged fifty-nine, September 6.
It was owing to the exertions of one Dr. Haygarth of Bath, England, that the idea of any healing power resident in the tractors themselves was refuted, for he and a colleague effected many cures with tractors made of painted wood, and Dr. Fessenden, of London, dealt the idea a final blow in his "Terrible Tractoration" (1800) by "Christopher Caustic."
Thacher stoutly maintains that Perkins had no intention of deceiving, but perhaps the large fortune made through tractoration hurried on the following act duly registered in the "Archives of the Medical Society" of the state of Connecticut, 1800, "that Dr. Elisha Perkins be expelled from the society as a patentee and user of nostrums."