In this account it is stated that the published cases of cures by the Tractors up to March, 1802, amounted to about five thousand. “Supposing,” the author goes on to say, “that not more that one cure in three hundred, which the Tractors have performed has been published, and the proportion is probably much greater, it will be seen that the number, to March, 1802, will have exceeded one million five hundred thousand. It is believed that no medical remedy ever yet discovered has been supported by so many well-authenticated and important cures, performed in so short a time.” And now, I ask, where is the Perkinean Institution, with its troop of governors for life, and where is the Perkinean practice, with its list of five thousand published cures? The institution expired while the governors for life were almost to a man in the land of the living; and in less than ten years after the summing up of the five thousand cures, Perkinism was only thought of as a thing that was past, and the far-famed Tractors were almost forgotten. And what became of Benjamin Douglass Perkins, who suffered for the cause of science and humanity such persecution as Galileo and Harvey and Jenner suffered before him? He returned to his native land with ten thousand pounds of John Bull’s money, as a reward of his patient endurance of persecution, and his active benevolence! I might extend this notice of names which have been famous in the history of quackery, but it is not necessary. Those which I have noticed will answer as illustrations of the mode in which medical delusions obtain their hold upon the public mind, and of the facility with which each in its turn is supplanted by some other. The essential materials of quackery, as I remarked in the Preface, have been the same in all ages; and its history would be only a description of the endless forms into which these materials have been moulded. Great as is the variety in the series of phantasmagoria with which quackery has excited the wonder of the world, they have all been produced upon the same canvas, and by the same old magic lantern. And busy and multiform as quackery has been, and lofty as have been its claims, I know not that it has ever made a _single discovery in medicine_. It may possibly have _stumbled_ upon some discovery, but I am not aware that it has done even this. On the other hand, all the discoveries which have been made in the medical art, so far as I know, have been the results of a truly scientific observation, and fairly belong to that ‘regular’ profession, which so many consider as being opposed to everything which is new. FOOTNOTES: