File:Elisha Perkins and his ‘medical tractors’ (33605815375).jpg
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During the late eighteenth century, Elisha Perkins, a practicing physician in Plainfield, CT, invented and patented an “electromagnetic” device he called “Tractors.” It was nothing more than 2 metal rods, 3 inches in length, that were flat on one side and round on the other that came to a point on one end. He claimed the rods were made from a blend of exotic and costly metals and metal alloys. They were intended to be used to stroke afflicted areas of the body in order to draw out “the noxious electrical fluids” Perkins thought were responsible for rheumatism and gout, as well as aches and pains afflicting the head, face, teeth, breast, side and stomach. The device even did double duty, because he claimed they were also effective for pain relief in mules! Although the Connecticut Medical Society condemned Perkin’s invention as quackery and expelled him from membership in the Society, other physicians were less skeptical. A Perkinsian Institution was founded in London where a tract entitled “The Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body” helped convince others to buy the tractors and put them to the test. In the U.S. the tractors gained popularity once it became known that President George Washington had bought a set for his family. After Perkins died from yellow fever in 1799, his son took over the business, but the medical community began to express some doubts about whether the device was effective in treating pain. British physician Dr. John Haygarth devised an early clinical trial in 1799, in which he substituted wooden “tractors” for metal ones, and found that four of five rheumatism patients reported pain relief. The next day, the same results were achieved with the metal tractors. His treatise on the findings was entitled “Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors and Epidemical Convulsions.” An important early demonstration of the placebo effect in healing, the tractors nonetheless continued to be sold more or less unabated until Perkins’ son died a decade later. The FDA History Office has a set of Perkins’ tractors in its “History Vault.” The artifact was donated by James Harvey Young, a historian whose expertise in FDA history and medical quackery is well known, but microscopic examination demonstrated that it is a reproduction. The steel is smoother than steel from the 18th century and shows signs of having been turned on a lathe, rather than poured into a mold, an earlier manufacturing procedure. Nevertheless, we estimate that FDA’s reproduction is at least 100 years old, enough to be considered an antique. |
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| Source | Elisha Perkins and his ‘medical tractors’ |
| Author | The U.S. Food and Drug Administration |
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Unless otherwise noted, the contents of the Food and Drug Administration website (www.fda.gov) —both text and graphics— are public domain in the United States. [1] (August 18, 2005, last updated July 14, 2015)
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This image was originally posted to Flickr by The U.S. Food and Drug Administration at https://flickr.com/photos/39736050@N02/33605815375 (archive). It was reviewed on 28 January 2018 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the United States Government Work. |
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| current | 00:20, 28 January 2018 | | 6,016 × 4,016 (4.58 MB) | Artix Kreiger 2 (talk | contribs) | Transferred from Flickr via Flickr2Commons |
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