The Perkins Metallic Tractors, drawn across the skin over an affected body part for approximately twenty minutes, relieve rheumatism, gout, paralysis, inflammation, and a range of other chronic conditions through the metallic drawing-out of a noxious electrical fluid responsible for the underlying disease.
The general-cure claim is the marketing-facing assertion of the Perkins Tractor practice. It rests entirely on unblinded patient self-report and family-and-practitioner observation, collected in Benjamin Douglas Perkins’s 1798 Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body and disseminated through testimonial pamphlets in the United States, Bath, and London between 1796 and 1810. No controlled outcome data were published in support of the claim. The claim was refuted by John Haygarth’s January 1799 fictitious-tractor experiment at Bath General Hospital, in which wooden imitations of the patented metallic pair produced the same patient-reported relief at no cost. The pattern (general cure claim, testimonial-only evidence base, refutation by simple imitation experiment within three years of patent grant) is the structural prototype of the disconfirmation arc this archive documents.
Appears in
Sources
- Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors, and Epidemical Convulsions — Haygarth, John. *Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors, and Epidemical Convulsions. Read to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Bath*. Bath: R. Cruttwell, for Cadell and Davies, Strand, London, 1800. 39 pp.
- Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates — Wootton, David. *Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates*. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xv + 304 pp. ISBN 0-19-280355-7.