Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.
Today. If you're asked to think of a tractor, most of us probably imagine a large farm vehicle. But in the late eighteenth century, a physician named Elijah Perkins made and sold a different kind of tractor, a device consisting of small metal rods that could cure you simply through touch. The Perkins patent Metallic Instruments, or Perkins tractors, as they became popularly known, were sold as a pair for twenty five continental dollars in the United States and five guineas
in Britain. For some perspective on those numbers, that's a few hundred in today's purchase price, and for several years people were mad for them. Welcome to Criminalia, I'm Maria Tremarky.
And I'm Holly Frye. Elisha Perkins's story begins in Connecticut. He was born in January of seventeen forty one to Joseph Perkins and Mary Bushnall. Joseph was a well respected Yale educated physician, and he educated his son in medicine. Elisha served as his father's assistant while also gaining knowledge in the field. The age of twenty, the young doctor Perkins established his own practice in Plainfield, Connecticut, less than
twenty miles from home. He very quickly gained a respectable number of patients and was known to be both a hard worker and in general a reliable guide. He's described in the New York Medical and Physical Journal as having been quote possessed by nature uncommon endowments, both bodily and mental in his person. He was six feet high and of remarkable symmetry. His ability to perform active professional business
was extraordinary. He frequently rode sixty miles a day, and generally on horseback, and this without the aid of artificial stimulants, never made making use of ardent spirits.
It was in his practice in Plainfield when Perkins made an observation that changed his life. He quote discovered that by drawing over the parts of the body affected in particular directions, certain instruments formed from metallic substances into certain shapes could remove most kinds of painful topical affections. Now that language is a little nebulous. Without more details, we know, so here's what's what.
Though he would later be shamed by his peers for his invention. Perkins came to his tractors through good faith, or at least he seems to have. His idea was based on an observation he had while performing surgery on a patient. He noted how a muscle would contract whenever he touched it with the point of a metallic instrument, and he believed that contraction was the result of muscles
excreting toxic electrical fluid. Okay, your body's muscles do contract and relax based on electrical charges, but this is not the same thing. He also saw a similar pain response in patients when he applied metallic instruments to inflamed tumors before he cut into them, and all of this gave him a light bulb moment.
Perkins believed with this discovery he could cure rheumatism, gout, and pain resulting from headaches toothicks, sprains, burns. That's all just part of a long list. He didn't just up and run away with his half baked idea, though. He took his observations seriously and took an empiricist role in analyzing his experiential evidence. Though it didn't help in the end.
His next step was to experiment with different metals to see which, if any, worked better than others, and if any other materials such as wood, had any benefits too. It took him several years of experimentation before he settled on brass and iron for his device.
In seventeen ninety six, Perkins began selling to his patient and to the public a new therapeutic device that he called the Perkins Tractors. The product, which he patented in February that year, was made up of two rods and described as quote half rounded on one side while the other was flat, usually had the name Perkins Patent Tractors stamped upon it. They were rounded at one end and drawn out into a sharp point at the other, and resembled a horseshoe nail in appearance. So each of these
rods was about three inches long. And we mentioned earlier that one rod was made of brass and the other was made of iron. While that's true, technically, Perkins decided one would be made of an alloy of zinc and copper. Those two combined make up brass plus gold and the other of iron plus silver and platinum. And this whole thing worked like this. The tractors were intended to be applied to the head, face, feet, breast, side, stomach, and back to quote draw off the noxious electrical fluid that
lay at the root of suffering. When applying it to his patients, Perkins drew at points over the affected areas of the body in a downward direction, and this whole process took about twenty minutes.
He promoted the tractors as a simple cure ale and that you didn't need to see a doctor for treatment. Anyone could use them right at home. They became so popular and trendy that people began using all sorts of things to pay for a pair of their own, from trading property to offering horses as currency. Perkins had investors too. We know of at least one man in Virginia who sold his plantation and invested everything in the product.
If you're thinking, wait, that's it, Yeah, that's right, Yes, that is all that it was. By just touching two short rods to the afflicted area of your body, poof your symptoms would disappear. For what it's worth, he claimed, the instruments could also be quote performed even on horses, where, of course, such influence could not be presumed to exist.
The Perkins tractors were a massive hit. Historian James del Borgo notes that the device was quote disarmingly simple, and according to del Borgo, that simplicity was what made it so appealing. Keep in mind that this was a time when doctors regularly resorted to such healing measures as bleeding, blistering, and purging patients, so compared to that, Perkins tractors were a painless alternative.
Perkins promoted his tractors in marketing pamphlets and newspaper advertisements. The first campaign began running in papers in early seventeen ninety seven. One spot that appeared in March of that year was published in the Aurora General Advertiser of Pennsylvania, and it read, get ready because this is a little long, but we're doing it. Quote doctor Perkins, patent metallic tractors.
Doctor Perkins of this city, who has the tractor for sale, requests those persons who wish to purchase or receive information respecting their efficacy to call on him at his office number fourteen South fourth Street, between the hours of seven and nine in the morning and from two to three o'clock in the afternoon. As his professional business renders it
inconvenient for him to attend at any other hour. The public may be assured that the doctor has not said more of their efficacy in his advertisements or pamphlets of certificates than their merit richly deserves. They are worthy the attention of every gentleman to keep in his family, and particularly to see farming men and planters.
With his son Benjamin working with him, Perkins published not just one but a series of marketing pamphlets describing the efficacy of the tractors, and began to include testimonials from satisfied clients and patients. In his advertorial pamphlet titled Certificates
of the Ethica of Doctor Perkins Patent Metallic Instruments. Testimonials included this one from William Allen, doctor of Divinity, who noted, quote, having had myself for a great many years a pair of them, if they have ever relieved pain, I have found them all so useful in picking walnuts.
Prominent names who used Perkins tractors included a list of what seems like kind of anyone who's anyone? According to an article published in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, quote the hospitals and infirmaries opened their doors to him, and the board of managers of the Almshouse were so impressed that they purchased the patent right for the tractors for Philadelphia. Even the President of the United States, George Washington,
purchased a set for use in his own family. The Chief Justice of the United States, the Honorable Oliver Ellsworth, was convinced of their value, and he not only purchased a set, but he also gave Perkins a letter of introduction to John Marshall, who later succeeded him as Chief Justice. Marshall also similarly purchased a set of his own, and that certainly did not hurt business.
At this time in his life, Perkins had a well established and successful medical practice. He had become chairman of the Wyndham County Medical Association in seventeen ninety five and was selected as a delegate to the Connecticut Medical Society. He supported higher education, and he opened his home as a hospital for those with disabilities who needed care and for those who were wealthy enough to pay for private care.
He set the stage for the founding of the Perkinean Institution in London, which gave free tractor therapy to those who couldn't afford treatment, but note that it wouldn't open its doors though until after his death. His star was rising, and by all accounts, he could have had a rewarding and prosperous medical career. One of Perkins's biographers put it quite well, stating, quote, the stage seemed set for a
successful career, but it was not to be. We're going to take a break forward from our sponsors, and when we return, we'll talk about the skeptics and how Perkins just kept keeping on despite them.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about how while the public loved perkins tractors, other physicians weren't so sure.
The thing about this story of quackery is that, as it unfolds, it's more about a medical professional who genuinely believed his bogus treatment actually had healing benefits, rather than a classic case of what we think of as snake oil products and sales. Perkins, as far as we all know about him, really did believe his tractors worked, whereas it's unlikely a snake oil salesman hawking a mixture of say, water, turpentine, and morphine believed his elixir would actually cure headaches or
typhoid or anything. Perkins tractors were popular and had the public's attention as a beneficial medical device. Some of his peers endorsed his product and also sought to figure out how the heck it worked.
Although the public was very into his product, there were, of course skeptics. Many physicians were already suspicious of novel medical therapies and claims made by contemporaries of Perkins, so another cual fad probably felt pretty weary. For instance, this was the time when animal magnetism, sometimes called Mesmerism, was a hot topic of conversation and a hot topic experts
were trying to debunk. It was an eighteenth century theory based on Anton Mesmer's belief that all living things had magnetic fields running through them and those fields could be manipulated for healing. With a buffet of controversial medical theories at the time, perkinstractors to many seemed to be just more quote delusive quackery, and that well, that resulted in Perkins's expulsion from the Connecticut Medical Society in May of
seventeen ninety seven. Even if no one could say why it didn't work, many thought the whole idea behind his tractors was just unbelievable, as detailed in a report by
the Medical Repository. Quote, whereas doctor Elisha Perkins, a member of this Society, having obtained a patent from under the authority of the United States, for the exclusive privilege of using and vending certain pointed metallic instruments, pretending that they were an invention of his own, and also that they possess inherent powers of curing many disease, which is contrary
to rules and regulations adopted by this Society. Therefore voted that the said Elisha Perkins be expelled from the Medical Society of the State of Connecticut.
Despite the critics, business was booming in the United States and Perkins expanded while Elisha held things down in the United States. His son Benjamin opened up shop in London, making tractors available to England and the larger European market. It was reported quote. The tractors were introduced in Copenhagen in seventeen ninety eight, where twelve physicians and surgeons, chiefly professors and lecturers in the Royal Frederick's Hospital, commenced a
course of experiments. The experiments fifty in number were deemed sufficiently important to demand publication. The professors introduced the term Perkinism in honor of the discoverer and asserted that it was of great importance to the physician.
Like Elisha, Benjamin published marketing pamphlets to his European audience.
He circulated a booklet called the Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body in removing various painful inflammatory disease such as rheumatism, pleurisy, some gouty affections, etc. Lately discovered by doctor Perkins of North America and demonstrated in a series of experiments and observations by professors Meg's, Woodward, Rogers, etc. By which the importance of the discovery is fully ascertained and a new field of inquiry opened in the modern
sciences of galvanism or animal electricity. Benjamin continually updated these materials, adding testimonials from people including physicians, lords and ladies, and other prominent members of society who had benefited from the product. The Observer and other London papers all printed advertisements for his pamphlets.
While Benjamin was abroad. Elijah turned his focus to a serious disease that was rampant and deadly in the United States in the late seventeen hundreds, and that's yellow fever.
He didn't give up on his tractors, they were still in high demand, but he was convinced that better use of antiseptics could stop yellow fever from spreading, and he offered to treat anyone suffering from it with a quote preparation of common vinegar saturated with muriate of soda, diluted with three fourths its quantity of hot water, and administered warm.
So yes, that's right. His antiseptic was vinegar, which, to be fair, does have some antimicrobial properties, but nothing that would help against a virus like yellow fever, plus some salt and water. He also recommended this mixture for dysentery and sore throats, and he was overwhelmed with demand from people wanting to try his yellow fever cure.
Unfortunately, though, Perkins himself was stricken with the disease and his so called cure did not help him. He died in September of seventeen ninety nine, when his tractor business was actually peaking. We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, and when we're back. We'll talk about the fall of Perkins tractors.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about the Perkins tractors and the placebo effect.
Perkins' critics and his proponents performed experiments to better understand the tractors and Perkins' theory behind the device. While they debated to disregard or to embrace his work, and despite criticism, Perkins tractors continued to be commercially successful in the United
States and across the Pond for about another decade. When Benjamin returned to the United States in eighteen oh seven, it's believed he treated or at least supplied tractors to as many as one and a half million patients and made ten thousand pounds in the process. Their popularity, though waned after Benjamin's death in eighteen ten.
In the end, the skeptics won, but with an interesting twist. Multiple physicians conducted tests to see if they could produce the same outcome as Perkins, and surprise, they did. London physician John Hagarth was at the forefront of this and in eighteen hundred tested the quote fictitious tractors and he
found not what he expected. Haygarth performed one of the first known single blinded experiments, which means one group of subjects was treated with genuine tractors and another with objects shaped like tractors but made of something other than metal, and Haygarth was the only one who knew who got which. He found he could produce the same effects with a fake pair of tractors as with the real thing, and concluded that the quote whole effect undoubtedly depends upon the
impression which can be made upon the patient's imagination. Right, So hold up talk about that, because that's what makes the story of Elijah Perkins one that's worth telling.
Tests conducted in an effort to debunk Perkins found the opposite of what physicians predicted. It turned out that any and all materials used were unexpectedly equally as effective as the genuine brass and iron tractors. The takeaway was as long as the patient believed they were being treated with Perkins tractors, not just told mind you, but believed the results were positive. This was and is a great example of what we call the placebo effect.
The placebo effect is a surprisingly powerful phenomenon that has been studied extensively in clinical trials. It's the idea that the human body can respond to a treatment simply because the person believes that treatment will work. So basically, your brain tricks you into thinking you're feeling better, though no one has proven it could shrink a tumor. Your brain can modulate your level of pain or fatigue, for instance,
and that's what this is about. Placebos have been used in medicine since antiquity, but the word placebo wasn't really introduced until the eighteenth century, specifically in reference to inert substances like saline injections or sugar pills being used instead of treatments proven to have real beneficial ingredients. But the idea didn't become part of the larger medical vocabulary until Haygarth published his findings in a paper titled on the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders
of the Body. That paper directly helped establish what we now call the placebo effect. Today, placebos are common in medical research and maybe brace yourself for a second. While it's not illegal for physicians to give placebos without a patient's knowledge, many admit they do prescribe them regularly, despite the ethical problem that it raises.
That's right, as stated in a study that was published in the British Journal of Medicine in two thousand and eight. Quote. Six hundred and seventy nine physicians responded to the survey. About half of the surveyed internists and rheumatologists reported prescribing placebo treatments on a regular basis. Most physicians, sixty two percent,
believe the practice to be ethically permissible. This, of course, is an ongoing issue of heated debate in the medical community, because while some physicians argue that in prescribing a placebo you're depriving a patient of bodily autonomy, others, as that study showed, think it's perfectly okay to do so if you just need to take a moment to digest that, please feel free.
While Elisha Perkins wasn't peddling snake oil in the way we might usually think of it, that doesn't mean he wasn't selling crap. In the end, he turns out to likely have been a physician who pursued a mistaken theory and did no more harm with his tractors than empty and gullible pockets. And it's too bad he died before he had the chance to read those papers about his product, and this thing called the placebo effect, because surely he would have found them fascinating.
I mean I think he would have been. I would like to think that he would have been fascinated and not defensive, but who knows. I don't know him.
I don't know him either, but I got that vibe from learning about him that he would have been like, wait, what is that?
That's cool? Right? Shall we use that in some way to help people? Will that? Sure?
Yellow fever?
I've got a little cures. What ails you? So?
Does alas that?
I think you will enjoy it? Okay? So this went through seven different names, including Wow, including ardent spirits, free tractor therapy, I thought a great In the end, we
called it the placebo effect. Yeah, And what I wanted to do with this drink was incorporate something metallic, but also make a drink that kind of hides the things that are actually creating the sensation while you're drinking it, so that it's hard to pick out the ingredients, but gives you a sense of coziness and you're not sure why. This isn't very far off from a whiskey sour, so I think you will like it. But it has a combination of things that may sound odd, but together they
do something really nice. Into a shaker with ice, you're gonna put three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice, a half ounce or so of simple syrup, a half ounce of mandarin orange liqueur if you can get it. If you can't get mandarin, you can do an orange liquur. But the mandarin does have a different flavor that I quite like. M this is a little predictable, but I promise there's a reason other than just the gold flakes.
But a half ounce of gold schlager, and then an ounce and a half if you can get it of bacon bourbon. Oh wow. This is like a bourbon that my local liquor stores carry. I don't have a hard time getting it. But if you cannot get it, you can just get regular bourbon and throw like a drop of liquid smoke in it, and it's gonna be the same thing if you can get it. Also a little bit of luster dust, like the edible glitter lustra, to
just put a little in. You don't have to put a ton in, and you are gonna shake this and pour it into like a rocks glass over fresh ice and then top it with soda. Listen, if you want to get fancy on your presentation, you could get like a sprig of a pretty neutral garnish like parsley and spray it. They make like a silver edible food safe spray that you can use like on cakes and cookies and stuff, and you can do your your garnish with that, and then you have like a little silver thing. That's
just if you want to do it for presentation. But here's what happens when you The cinnamon is the last flavor to make itself known, but it does so in a way that it's hard to know that it's cinnamon, like it mostly tastes a little bit citrusy and pretty light and refreshing considering how many things are in it that have very heavy flavors. Like something happens with the lemon, the orange and the cinnamon and the bacony bourbon that it's all smooths each other out and you're just kind
of like, this is refreshing. It doesn't even taste that alcoholic. But then at the end, oh, there's just a cozy sense to it.
And you don't know why you don't know.
Why, so much like Perkins and stuff, you don't know why it works or makes you feel cozy, but it does. It's not going to actually cure anything. Listen, Citrus is good for you in varieties of ways, but that's not really This is not a health drink. To make the mocktail, it's pretty simple. You are going to sub out that mandarin liqueur for syrup for mandarin syrup. If you want to make a mandarin syrup, it's just like we do
all the time. A cup of sugar, a cup of water, some chopped up mandarin oranges, let that simmer and then strain. The whole thing quite delicious. You can also just do orange syrup if that's what you can find. A half ounce of cinnamon syrup, which same thing. You can make your own. If you can't find it, just throw some cinnamon sticks in the mix. And then for this one instead of the bacon bourbon, we'll do a black tea
and do what we did. If I said you couldn't find bacon bourbon, toss literally you just need a drop of liquid smoke in there, I will say for the mocktail, because you're using two syrups you can leave out the simple syrup in that one and just do those taste it. If you want it sweeter, go for it, but I don't think it needs it. And then same deal. Throw in some lustra dust, shake it, shake it, pour it over ice, and top it with soda. It's very yummy
and also very refreshing. But you won't be like, I can't believe there's no alcohol in here, because there is no alcohol. Don't sub these out and try to confuse anybody. That's not cool. That will take away bodily autonomy, and it's not okay. But that is the placebo effect, which is surprisingly yummy. I wasn't sure how the mandarin and cinnamon would play together, but in fact they're buddies, their buddies.
I didn't like them in the original drink. I tasted it before I added simple syrup and it was not working. You really need that sweetener to like make everybody hold hands. It's essentially something if you start playing around with drinks, and I hope that any of our listeners have, there are times when you taste it and you're like, this is trash, and then you'll add just a tiny amount of one thing and it's like, oh no, it's fine.
As an option, you can also add a couple of dashes of angister of bitters to it if you want. That's always optional. It changes it a little. It kind of gear shifts the flavor, but not significantly. So that is the placebo effect, which, hopefully, if you make it, leaves you with the sense of warmth, happiness and yumminess and doesn't make you angry or suspicious or skeptical of anything.
Fictitious.
We want to, as always thank you for spending this time with us. We will be right back here again next week. But a little more snake oil. The little more cures what ails you, and uh we hope you're with us. Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.