How long Fessenden was concerned with this project we do not know, for it is the spring of 1803 before we hear of him again. Then, as tho this man of theory had not been sufficiently punished for meddling in the schemes of "practical" men, he was put at the mercy of another Yankee. This time the project was more successful, since Fessenden furnished not capital or engineering skill, but propaganda verse.

His new acquaintance was Benjamin Douglas Perkins, Yale 1794, who had been in London for several years promoting the sale of his father's "metallic tractors," one of the most famous quack remedies the western world has known. The inventor, Dr. Elisha Perkins, was born in Norwich, Connecticut, January 16, 1741, the son of Dr. Joseph Perkins, and was educated by his father. He was a man of restless, almost tireless energy, and of magnetic personality. He built up a notable practice and stood well in his profession, being one of the incorporators of the Connecticut Medical Society, until in 1795 he had invented his Metallic Tractors. These were two bits of metal about three inches long, in appearance much like horseshoe nails, of a peculiar composition, he pretended, tho actually merely of brass and iron respectively. When stroked over an inflamed spot on the body they were supposed to relieve pain by the action of bodily electricity, the "fluid" drawing the disease from the affected part. The Tractors were sold at five guineas a pair (tho costing about a shilling to manufacture), accompanied by a contract, which provided that only the original purchaser and one other member of his family could use the instrument, and that the purchaser might sell it, but that its virtues might not be produced by a third owner.

"One of the best sketches of Perkins and Perkinism is "Dr. Elisha Perkins of Plainfield, Conn., and His Metallic Tractors" by Walter R. Steiner, M.D., in Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago, III, 79-95, January 1923. Its footnotes give a fairly complete bibliography of material on the subject. Every history of quackery or of medicine gives some account of Perkins. These sketches are often careless in telling of Fessenden's part in the epidemic. E.g.: The article on Elisha Perkins by Davina Waterson in Kelly and Burrage: American Medical Biographies, Baltimore, 1920, page 907, contains four misstatements in two lines: "and Dr. Fessenden, of London, dealt the idea a final blow in his Terrible Tractoration (1800).”

After some experiments in Connecticut, Doctor Perkins went to Philadelphia, where he won a phenomenal success with clients of all sorts, from inmates of almshouses to members of Congress. While he was absent from the state, the Connecticut Medical Society passed a vote of censure, and expelled him from membership in 1797 as a user of nostrums:

It having been represented to the Society...... that under such auspices as membership of this Society, and the patent above mentioned, the delusion is progressing to the southward, which may occasion disgrace to the Society and mischief abroad; wherefore this Society announce to the public, that they consider all such practices as barefaced imposition, disgraceful to the faculty, and delusive to the ignorant.

But the popularity of the Tractors increased. People sold horses and carriages to buy them; many prominent men-it is said that George Washington bought a set to be used on his plantation-favored them, and large numbers sought treatment. Elisha Perkins is remembered as the promoter of the fraud, "although some of us," says Doctor Steiner, "occasionally have qualms lest he may have been a poor, deluded individual." Perhaps he was honest in his belief in the efficacy of the Tractors, in spite of his deception in describing their composition and of his inability to give any scientific explanation of their action, altho the tremendous success-financial rather than professionalmay have led him to attribute to the bits of metal effects which he knew were due to the patient's imagination.

Doctor Perkins also constructed a remedy which he thought would be efficacious in fighting fever, and like many other physicians of New England went to New York City during the epidemic of 1798-99 and there, September 6, 1799, became a martyr to the disease he was fighting.

Pamphlets and books-advertising matter which the public was willing to purchase-describing the Tractors and detailing. cures in large numbers were published in rapid succession from 1796 on. Professors of three American universities endorsed the Tractors (including Nahum Smith of Dartmouth, later of Yale Medical School, and Bezaleel Woodward, one of Fessenden's instructors, who wrote a testimonial in the 1796 pamphlet); Doctors of Divinity added their prestige and appealed to philan

thropists to make the boon accessible to all men; the opinions of twelve reputable physicians of Copenhagen, supported by testimonials from less conspicuous persons, were published in a volume of 355 pages; and London for a time supported a "Perkinean Institution" under the patronage of the Right Honourable Lord Rivers and Sir William Barker, that the benefits of the Tractors might be extended to the poor. The movement was even more successful in England than in the United States, Denmark, or Germany, perhaps owing to the publicity created by the younger Perkins. He sold Tractors, gave treatments, published testimonials, answered critics, secured patrons, and encouraged writers of tractorian literature-and finally, having become a Quaker, left England (at the "psychological moment") in 1803 with £10,000 gain, and established himself in the book business in New York.

At the beginning of the year 1803, Perkins, in need of “publicity," met Fessenden, in need of cash; the result was the publication in the spring of that year of Fessenden's first long poem, which comes really as the climax of the agitation for Perkinism. The publisher's preface to the first American edition, based apparently on information obtained from Fessenden, says that the poem was undertaken in February, 1803, and completed in four weeks, appearing as an octavo pamphlet of ninety pages, price three shillings sixpence. A second edition, twice as large, was issued two months later, and the poem grew steadily thru the remaining four editions published in America.

The title page is appropriate to the contents: "Terrible Tractoration!! A Poetical Petition against Galvanising Trumpery, and the Perkinistic Institution. In Four Cantos. Most Respectfully Addressed to the Royal College of Physicians, by Christopher Caustic, M.D., LL.D., ASS., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Aberdeen, and Honorary Member of No Less than Nineteen Very Learned Societies."

The poem is an ironical petition, in Hudibrastic verse, to the Royal College of Physicians to make war upon the users of Perkins' Tractors, in competition with whom Dr. Caustic has been worsted. The poem is more than a defense of the Tractors, for it becomes a general satire upon superficial science and upon genuine science that was spectacular, and especially upon men of science who left their experiments for theory and upon.

their antipodes, men of letters with not wit enough to let science alone. Altho the satire thruout centers about Dr. Caustic and his wild schemes, which are shown to be as feasible and at least as valuable as those of Doctor Darwin and some others, and altho the purpose is ostensibly to compare unfavorably the Perkineans with these really ridiculous tho for the time reputable

men of science, the scope of the satire is general and must have owed its popularity largely to that fact. Canto I, "Ourself,” contains the most material not relating directly to the Tractors; the middle cantos, "Conjurations!" and "Manifesto," attempt to arouse the physicians to undertake the "Grand Attack!" described in the fourth.

Fessenden explains his purpose in the preface:

The author's ambition has been to produce an original performance, and avoid all 'servile trick' and 'imitative knack' of ordinary dealers in rhyme. He had rather introduce indefensible eccentricities, and run the hazard of the lash of the critic, than to 'threat his reader, not in vain, with sleep.'

Although attacks upon the Metallic Tractors are the principal subject of the following Poem, still the author has painted

'every idle thing

That Fancy finds in her discursive flight;'

and he is sorry to say that our modern philosophers furnish such a multitude of 'idle things,' which they call discoveries and inventions, that he need never lay his brush aside for want of proper subjects upon which to exercise his skill in his vocation. Were the inutility of their researches the only objection which could be urged against them, they might be permitted to follow their frivolous pursuits without molestation. But when, in addition to inutility, their experiments are accompanied with the grossest inhumanity, the indignation of the reflecting mind is roused at so wanton a misapplication of time, and prostitution of talent.

Fessenden's statements about Perkinism in this preface seem to endorse the practice quite earnestly. The "Address delivered before the Perkinean Society, at their public Dinner, at the Crown and Anchor, July 15, 1803” which is appended to the preface in the American edition (The poem is printed in the London edition of Original Poems) borrows from philosophy to strengthen the position of the Perkinites:

What, though the CAUSES may not be explain'd,
Since these EFFECTS are duly ascertain'd,
Let not self-interest, prejudice, or pride,
Induce mankind to set the means aside.

The first canto, entitled, quite properly, "Ourself!", glorifies the supposed author by comparing his scientific feats with others which were general topics of conversation in 1803.