Xavier Nesbit
Hobart, Australia

In the closing years of the eighteenth century, a Connecticut country doctor named Elisha Perkins (1741-1799) produced one of early America’s strangest medical devices. In the process, he also unwittingly gave medicine one of its first clinical trials.

Perkins, who had served as a surgeon during the Siege of Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill, built a respectable rural practice in Plainfield before turning his attention to the therapeutic possibilities of metal, around 1795.¹ His invention consisted of two tapered rods, each about three inches long, blunt at one end and pointed at the other. One was said to be made of an unusual iron alloy and the other of brass, although their true composition was a closely guarded secret. Drawn lightly across an aching joint or inflamed patch of skin for some twenty minutes, the “tractors” were claimed to draw off the “noxious electrical fluid” believed to pool wherever disease took hold – a theory borrowed loosely from recent electrical experiments of Luigi Galvani.² On February 19, 1796, Perkins secured a fourteen-year patent for the tractors, reputedly the first ever granted for a medical device in the newly formed United States.³

The reception among Perkins’ peers was swift and unsparing. In May 1797, the Connecticut Medical Society, of which he was a member, decided that a man selling “pointed metallic instruments” under the pretence of cure had violated the Society’s rules against nostrums, and expelled him outright.² This made little difference. Perkins claimed five thousand cures, certified, he said, by eight professors, forty physicians, and thirty clergymen; even George Washington purchased a set for his household.⁴

The real triumph, however, belonged to his son. Benjamin Douglas Perkins carried the tractors to London in 1798, took rooms at Leicester Square, and sold sets for five guineas apiece. “But a very trifling consideration,” he assured buyers, given their evident usefulness.⁵ A Perkinean Institution was founded for treating the poor under the patronage of Lord Rivers, and twelve surgeons at Copenhagen’s Royal Frederiks Hospital lent the device their support. James Gillray, never one to let a fashionable absurdity pass unmocked, immortalized the treatment in an 1801 caricature showing a tractor being applied to a patient’s grotesquely swollen, carbuncled nose – a print now held by the Wellcome Collection.⁶

It was in Bath, a great clearinghouse of eighteenth-century medical fashion, that the tractors met their most consequential opponent, the physician John Haygarth; newly retired to the city, Haygarth suspected that whatever relief patients felt owed nothing to iron or brass. In 1799, he treated five rheumatic sufferers with wooden rods painted to resemble Perkins’ tractors. Four reported their pain eased. The following day, the same patients were treated with real metal tractors and experienced, by their own account, much the same relief. Haygarth published his findings in a study now widely credited as among the earliest deliberate demonstrations of what would later be called the placebo effect.⁷

Perkins did not live to see his invention’s slow eclipse. In 1799, during a yellow fever epidemic in New York, he tested a remedy of his own devising upon the stricken – a mixture of vinegar and muriate of soda. It failed. He contracted the fever himself and died within days, an irony not lost on his critics.⁸ Nonetheless, supporters continued to rally around his memory: in 1803, the poet Thomas Green Fessenden published Terrible Tractoration, a mock-heroic verse defending Perkins against his detractors.² But after Benjamin Perkins’s own death in 1810, demand for the tractors dwindled, and by mid-century they survived only as a curiosity of medical history.

Genuine sets, stamped “PERKINS PATENT TRACTORS” at the rounded end, are now rare enough to be treated as artifacts. The Science Museum Group in London holds a pair in a decorated red leather casing, alongside gilt and silvered replicas presented by the Dittrick Museum in Cleveland.⁹ The Smithsonian holds another example, acquired in 1902 for a collection then catalogued, tellingly, under “Psychic Medicine.”¹⁰

In 1932 the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Morris Fishbein, surveying the affair a century on, confessed himself unable to decide whether Perkins had been “merely a somewhat deluded physician or actually a great impostor.”¹¹ The tractors offered no answer, though Perkins, had he been consulted, would doubtless have had one ready.

References

1. Quen JM. Elisha Perkins, physician, nostrum-vendor, or charlatan? Bull Hist Med. 1963;37:159-166.
2. Miller WS. Elisha Perkins and his metallic tractors. Yale J Biol Med. 1935;8(1):41-57.
3. Lindemann M. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press; 2010.
4. Wilson JG, Fiske J, eds. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York, NY: D Appleton; 1900.
5. Perkins BD. The Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body, in Removing Various Painful Inflammatory Diseases, Such as Rheumatism, Pleurisy, Some Gouty Affections, &c. &c. London: Printed for J Johnson; 1798.
6. Gillray J. Metallic-Tractors. Published November 11, 1801. H Humphrey; London. Wellcome Collection.
7. Haygarth J. Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors, and Epidemical Convulsions. Bath: R Cruttwell; 1800.
8. Holbrook SH. The Golden Age of Quackery. New York, NY: Macmillan; 1959.
9. Science Museum Group. Two Perkins “Tractors.” Science Museum Group Collection. Object 1986-372. Accessed August 13, 2026.
10. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Perkins Tractors. Object ID MG.143091. Accessed August 15, 2026.
11. Fishbein M. The Medical Follies: An Analysis of the Foibles of Some Healing Cults, Including Osteopathy, Homeopathy, Chiropractic, and the Electronic Reactions of Abrams, With Essays on the Antivivisectionists, Health Legislation, Physical Culture, Birth Control, and Rejuvenation. New York, NY: Boni & Liveright; 1925.