Does it work? You try it. You get better. But did the thing you tried cause you to get better? Or just the fact that you tried; believing it would work? Let me quote from Martin Gardner's classic Fads & Fallacies In the Name of Science:
America's first great quack was Dr. Elisha Perkins (1740-1799). The doctor had a theory that metals draw diseases out of the body, and in 1796 patented a device consisting of two rods, each three inches long. One rod was supposed to be an alloy of copper, zinc, and gold; the other - iron, silver, and platinum. By drawing "Perkins' Patented Metallic Tractor" downward over the ailing part, the disease was yanked out.
Perkins sold his tractors for five guineas each to such notables as George Washington, whose entire family used it, and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth. His son, Benjamin D. Perkins (Yale, class of `94) made a fortune selling the tractors in England. In Copenhagen, twelve doctors published a learned volume defending "Perkinism." Benjamin himself wrote a book in 1796, containing hundreds of stirring testimonials by well-educated people. They included doctors, ministers, university professors, and members of Congress. Most historians of the subject think the old man actually believed in his tractors, but that the son - who retired in New York City as a wealthy man - was simply a crook promoter.
It is worth noting that orthodox medical opinion, by and large, ignored Perkinism, regarding it as not worthy of serious refutation. One doctor, however, did trouble to make some tests with phony tractors. They looked like the genuine article, but actually were non-metallic. His results, of course, were excellent. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in an amusing discussion of Perkinism, relates that one woman was quickly cured of pains in her arm and shoulder by using a fake tractor made of wood. "Bless me!" the woman exclaimed, "Why, who could have thought it, that them little things could pull the pain from one!"
Before dismissing the "Tractors" consider the following bit of new medical technology: Implanted in such notables as the Vice President of the United States, are tiny devices that give a pulse to the heart, keeping it going. The electrical rhythm works or else Dick Chaney would be a dead man.
Popular TV shows how to jump start the heart with a good jolt of electricity. It works.
Brain scans show minute electrical impulses cascading as the result of nothing more than "thought".
Maybe Galvani and his missus were onto something.
All this is quite apart from the "placebo" effect that we all are subject to. Ringing a bell and causing a dog to salivate, smell of cooking food, suggestive pictures, all gets the mind worked up and produces a result. So why shouldn't a sugar pill work? And why shouldn't the Perkin's Tractors have resulted in a favorable response?
Franz Anton Mesmer (who gave us mesmerizing) perhaps went a bit too far with his animal magnetism. But the concept is alive and well.
For more on the subject John Greenway of the University of Kentucky offers a nice discourse on tractors and such. (This link no longer works.)
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