advocates of his discovery, many of them of high standing and influence.
In the year 1798 the tractors had crossed the Atlantic, and were
publicly employed in the Royal Hospital at Copenhagen. About the same
time the son of the inventor, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, carried
them to London, where they soon attracted attention. The Danish
physicians published an account of their cases, containing numerous
instances of alleged success, in a respectable octavo volume. In the
year 1804 an establishment, honored with the name of the Perkinean
Institution, was founded in London. The transactions of this institution
were published in pamphlets, the Perkinean Society had public dinners
at the Crown and Anchor, and a poet celebrated their medical triumph in
strains like these:

"See, pointed metals, blest with power t' appease
The ruthless rage of merciless disease,
O'er the frail part a subtle fluid pour,
Drenched with invisible Galvanic shower,
Till the arthritic staff and crutch forego,
And leap exulting like the bounding roe!"

While all these things were going on, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins was
calmly pocketing money, so that after some half a dozen years he left
the country with more than ten thousand pounds, which had been paid him
by the believers in Great Britain. But in spite of all this success, and
the number of those interested and committed in its behalf, Perkinism
soon began to decline, and in 1811 the Tractors are spoken of by an
intelligent writer as being almost forgotten. Such was the origin and
duration of this doctrine and practice, into the history of which we
will now look a little more narrowly.

Let us see, then, by whose agency this delusion was established and kept
up; whether it was principally by those who were accustomed to medical
pursuits, or those whose habits and modes of reasoning were different;
whether it was with the approbation of those learned bodies usually
supposed to take an interest in scientific discoveries, or only of
individuals whose claims to distinction were founded upon their position
in society, or political station, or literary eminence; whether the
judicious or excitable classes entered most deeply into it; whether, in
short, the scientific men of that time were deceived, or only intruded
upon, and shouted down for the moment by persons who had no particular
call to invade their precincts.

Not much, perhaps, was to be expected of the Medical Profes