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more than temporary palliation of localized pain. Johan Daniel Herholdt, surgeon of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Copenhagen, conducted experiments using a pair of Tractors brought to him by the wife of an American army major. His results were only slightly satisfactory. He had not been given the fulsome accompanying treatise, so there was no added placebo effect. The Tractors went to Germany, where the Royal Physician tried them and added a few deprecatory notes of his own to those of the Danish scientists. Fortunately for Benjamin Perkins, he obtained the comments before they became available to the general public, rewrote the testimonials to favor Tractors, reasserting that they worked, as so many happy patients in the United States and Great Britain could attest.

Dr. John Haygarth, a debunker of Tractors, stated in his 1799 essay “Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Ficticious Tractors, and epidemical convulsions,” “An enthusiastick dupe of this doctrine can perform cures with incomparably greater success than the most skilful physician or surgeon, with the aid of the most pompous figures of geometry which can be described, or fictitious stories which can be related. Genuine enthusiasm is wonderfully infectious.” Benjamin Perkins died in 1810 a wealthy man, his fortune made by harnessing the “electricity” of excitement and hope. Without him to boost them in the public eye, the Tractors disappeared almost completely by 1811. Sheepish customers probably threw them away, realizing that they had paid for an idea, not a cure.

You Married Whom?

Sometimes what should have been a great romance turns instead into a fatal attraction. This is even worse if the participants are royalty and the victim their countries.

FREDERICK OF PRUSSIA AND PRINCESS VICTORIA

GERMANY, 1858

Elizabeth Moon

Fritz and Vicky met first at the Great Exhibition. He was twenty; she was ten. They met again in Scotland, where he proposed to the vivacious girl, though she was then too young to marry. When Fritz married Vicky three years later, on January 25, 1858, her parents were delighted: this was the marriage they’d hoped and planned for. His relatives were less happy; they particularly resented her mother’s insistence that she be married in her own church, at home, and they hoped Vicky would not be as strong-minded. The couple themselves were genuinely in love, both with each other and with ideas — they were intelligent, diligent, capable, and well intentioned.

They were also at the eye of a political hurricane: late - nineteenth - century Europe. Vicky — Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise — was Queen Victoria’s oldest child; Fritz — Frederick, son of William (then regent for his mentally ill brother, but soon to be King of Prussia in his own right) was crown prince of Prussia and would become crown prince of a Germany united by Bismarck in 1871, a Germany which would be victorious in several wars (against Austria, Denmark, and finally France). Already, Prussia resented England’s imperial might, its wealth and prestige. Prussia did not want a bossy English princess giving advice. But Prince Albert had influenced both Vicky and Frederick, and Vicky, like her mother, believed she had a mission to carry out her father’s hopes for a peaceful, productive European society with constitutional governments.

While it may be hard to think of Queen Victoria and her children as liberals today, a glance into Prussian concepts of government will make it clear why they were so labeled.

The Prussians felt about Vicky the way Republicans feel about Hillary Clinton — she was a horrid, nasty, evil woman with ideas, albeit being only seventeen when she married — and they hated and distrusted her even before the marriage. Her parents, especially her father, had seen to her education; she was multilingual, extremely well read, and enthusiastic about the changes that Frederick might be able to make. She talked politics. She tried to — and actually did — influence her husband. Germans desired no such talents in