Note 93 — CANTO III. MANIFESTO.

Will e’en bewitch the operator.

No part of the learned doctor’s management, in the anti-Perkinistic cause, merits higher eulogy than this most rational explanation of that most irrational practice. So cogently does an innate principle of equity control me, that I am absolutely coerced to offer, at the shrine of the heroic doctor, my tributary dole of the incense of admiration, for having presented our profession such a powerful knock-me-down argument, wherewith to buffet the common enemy.

The sagacious doctor having published a scientific treatise against the tractors, demonstrating that “they act on the patient’s imagination,” Perkins, came out in reply, with all the fury of an Irish rebel, and declared that the doctor deserved to be trounced for not suffering his readers to know, that the tractors pretended to cure infants and brute animals, though numerous cases to that effect had then been published; and in that reply proclaimed that Dr H. purposely endeavored to suppress such facts, that he might, with greater facility, induce the public to swallow the deductions drawn from his magical manœuvres in the Bath and Bristol hospitals. Now, admitting the doctor managed in this way, I am sure he was perfectly right in so doing. The end in view, according to established principles of modern morality, will ever justify the means taken to accomplish that end. In this case, the end in view was most important—nothing less than the downfall of Perkinism, and the consequent aggrandizement of our profession. Should any of our opponents be so captious as to assert, that such principles and such motives of action should not be encouraged in society—that they have a pernicious tendency, and other nonsense of that sort, I must take the liberty to refer them to the first consul of the French republic, whose conduct has ever been modelled according to the principles above stated, and who is certainly the most powerful logician of the age, perfectly able to confound those who shut their eyes against the light of conviction.

But to revert to the doctor’s treatise, and Perkins’s impudent replication. The man who could raise the very old gentleman himself, by the legitimate powers of necromancy, was not so easily defeated. Accordingly he returns to the charge in another edition—admits the existence of the numerous cases on infants, horses, &c. but lays them all level with the following unanswerable argument.—“The proselytes of Perkinism having been driven from every other argument, have, as a last resource, alleged that the patent metallic tractors have removed the disorders of infants and horses. Even this flimsy pretence is capable of a satisfactory refutation. In these cases it is not the patient, but the observer, who is deceived by his own imagination!!!” See Haygarth’s book, page 40. Mirabile dictu!