Cures; the story of the cures that fail / by James J. Walsh.

  • James Joseph Walsh
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Cures; the story of the cures that fail / by James J. Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and modes of healing have found the readiest followers. Americans are more enterprising and, as a result, we have had ever so many more successful discoverers of new remedies which have cured for a while and then failed, than any other country. In the meantime the inventor or the discoverer has made his fortune out of the new cure that he launched, then with canny Ameri¬ can practicableness has kept the fortune that he made out of it and transmitted it to his descendants. Not a few of our best families owe the foundation of their prosperity to the fact that there was a remedy com¬ pounder in the family tree a generation or two ago. Some examples are particularly interesting. Just about the time that Galvani discovered that a frog’s legs would twitch when the nerves were touched by certain metals, a Yale graduate, Dr. Elisha Perkins, invented his metallic tractors and proceeded to cure nearly all the chronic diseases with them. Pie created a great sen¬ sation not only here but across the water. Plis tractors may still be seen in our American museums. Almost needless to say there is nothing in them, they are just inert pieces of metal, but hundreds of thousands of cures were made by them; the enthusiastic son of the inventor thinks that the cures were up in the millions. Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century, animal magnetism enjoyed a great vogue with us. We had magnetizers of all kinds. Probably most of them were quite convinced that they were possessed of some wonderful power which they could transfer to the body of others and cure them of all manner of diseases. It would be surprising if they did not believe it, for did not patients suffering from all sorts of diseases come to them and after being treated for a time proclaim them-
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