You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [24]
The scientists themselves may have had similar delusions of grandeur. The use of electricity as an experimental and medical tool is reported to have begun as an observation at the dinner table. Galvani’s wife, Lucia, had prepared frogs’ legs for dinner. Luigi noticed that one of them was still twitching. He believed that the effect was caused by a latent power he called animal electricity conducted to the muscles by a fluid. He devised an electrostatic machine so that he could duplicate the effect he witnessed.
His investigations were followed very soon by many other thinkers, but it was not until 1800, when Volta’s electrical storage system made sensational public displays of the theory possible, that the general public joined the debate. Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew, performed public demonstrations in London in 1802 during which he applied current to nerves in the bodies of executed criminals, causing facial contortions and spontaneous muscular contractions.
As with all new inventions, the promoters suggested that electrical current could revolutionize medical science. Dr. Andrew Ure, another scientist who offered a public show using a Voltaic pile, even suggested that it could restore life, a notion that probably influenced Mary Shelley. Over time, electricity and galvanism came to be associated with legitimate medical treatments such as electroshock therapy, muscle stimulation and acupuncture, but in the meanwhile, there was plenty of room for wrong thinking, scientific dead ends and downright fraud.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, philosophers were beginning to question standard medical practice. At the same time as Galvanism was gaining a following, so was Mesmerism and homeopathy. The public was eager to try new cures, which they hoped would be more effective than the ones in use at the time.
Into this period of open minds strode Dr. Elisha Perkins. In 1796, Perkins was expelled from the Connecticut Medical Society for quackery. He had invented a cure-all device for pain and gout that he called Tractors. Tractors were a pair of metal rods three inches long, pointed at one end and rounded at the other, one rod made of brass and the other of iron. They could be used by anyone, not requiring an attached battery to work their miracle. The practitioner, following the very complicated treatise that accompanied the device, stroked the affected part. Within a short time, if the treatment was performed correctly, the Tractors unblocked the “solar fluid” or “electrical matter” so it flowed unchecked through the body.
“Perkinism” became a fad. Perkins claimed that his device would cure “pains in the head, face, teeth, breast, side, stomach, back, rheumatism and some gouts.” Reports of successes poured in. Even George Washington fell for the sales pitch and bought a pair. Apparently he found some relief with them, because Perkins obtained a letter of introduction from him to John Marshall of the Continental Congress. In 1799 Perkins tried to treat his own yellow fever with his Tractors, and died.
Benjamin Perkins, his son, renewed the patent on his father’s invention and began to sell his devices in Europe. Jumping on the interest evoked by Galvani’s experiments and Aldini’s demonstrations, his advertisements suggested the Tractors worked because of the Galvanic principles. Sales increased, and more patients proclaimed that they had been cured, though those cures almost certainly owe their success to faith in the device and the placebo effect, not the Tractors.
Benjamin had all the instincts of a modern marketing genius. To promote the device, he created the Perkinsean Institution in 1803 and commissioned a poem to be read at the opening, which went in part:
See Pointed Metals, blest with power t’appease,
The ruthless rage of merciless disease.
O’er the frail part a subtil fluid pour,
Drench’d with invisible Galvanic shower…
But whatever his glorious claims, the Tractors never produced