‘Metalic Tractors’, 1801

Description

Mounted hand coloured etching and aquatint, entitled ‘METALIC TRACTORS’, designed and etched by James Gillray, and published by H. Humphrey in 1801.

A thin man, his hair powdered and in a long queue, holds one tractor in his mouth as he applies the second tractor to the carbuncled nose of a seated patient, from which bursts sheets of flame as the stunned patient’s physical wig falls off. His bemused dog looks on.

Perkins metalic tractors were patented in 1798 by Elisha Perkins, an American physician. Elisha Perkins unfortunately died of Yellow Fever in New York the following year while demonstrating a cure for the disease.

His son, Benjamin Douglas Perkins, brought the invention to Britain, where the craze for the Tractors was such that even a ‘Perkinean Instiution’ was established, for the free treatment of the poor who could not afford the price of five guineas for a pair of the miraculous Tractors. The Tractors had to be regularly drawn across the affected area of the body for a cure to be achi