Besides, the absolute neglect into which the Tractors soon
declined is good evidence that they were incapable of affording any
considerable and permanent relief in the complaints for the cure of which
they were applied.
Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely to nature;
which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical. Of
course many persons experienced at least temporary relief from the strong
impression made upon their minds by this novel and marvellous method of
treatment.
Many, again, influenced by the sanguine hopes of those about them, like
dying people, who often say sincerely, from day to day, that they are
getting better, cheated themselves into a false and short-lived belief
that they were cured; and as happens in such cases, the public never knew
more than the first half of the story.
When it was said to the Perkinists, that whatever effects they produced
were merely through the imagination, they declared (like the advocates of
the ROYAL TOUCH and the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM) that this explanation was
sufficiently disproved by the fact of numerous and successful cures which
had been witnessed in infants and brute animals. Dr. Haygarth replied to
this, that "in these cases it is not the Patient, but the Observer, who
is deceived by his own imagination," and that such may be the fact, we
have seen in the case of the good lady who thought she had conjured away
the spot from her friend's countenance, when it remained just as before.
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