Perkins's Patent Metallic Tractors

Perkins's Patent Metallic Tractors
Illustration of the front and back of the tractors as well as their container box, c. 1801
a.k.a.	Dr. Perkins's Patent Metallic Instruments, Dr. Perkins's Metallic Points
Creator(s)	Elisha Perkins

Caricature of Elisha Perkins using one of his tractors by James Gillray, dated 1801.

Perkins's Patent Metallic Tractors (or Metallic Instruments, Metallic Points) are sets of three-inch, single-pointed metal rods, designed and patented by Elisha Perkins in 1796, which were sold for use as an electro-therapeutic cure of various "local inflammations, pains in the head, face, teeth, breast, side, stomach, and back." Through contact with the afflicted area, the tractors would, according to the inventor and his promoters, act as attractors, "drawing off the noxious electrical fluid that lay at the root of the suffering" to bring about "blessed relief."

Reading

• Perkins, E., The Family Remedy; or, Perkins's Patent Metallic Tractors, For the Relief of Topical Disease of the Human Body: And of Horses, https://archive.org/details/b30389562 

Contemporary

• Perkins, Benjamin Douglas (1798), The Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body, London: Printed for J. Johnson, https://archive.org/details/b21458121 
• Haygarth, John (1800), Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors and Epidemical Convulsions, Bath, https://archive.org/details/b21949037 

20th Century

• Miller, William Snow (October 1935), "Elisha Perkins and His Metallic Tractors", Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 8 (1): 41-57, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2601307/ 
• Young, James Harvey (1961), "Galvanizing Trumpery", The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation, Princeton University Press