“QUACKERY” IN THE FIELD OF HEALING: A DOCTOR’S VIEW

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 70, 19 July 1948, Page 4

“QUACKERY” IN THE FIELD OF HEALING: A DOCTOR’S VIEW

If a man entered medicine about 200 years ago he usually knew almost all there was to know on the subject, said Doctor F. Appleby in an address to the weekly meeting of the Whakatane Rotary Club on Tuesday night, on “Quackery.” However the subject today had been explored to such an extent, he continued, that the modern medical man had a large and varied syllabus to work on. Apart from the real medical practises that have grown up through the years, there was a side form of medicine called by Doctors “Quackery” and under this heading were grouped all types of unorthodox healing. Not all of those practises were bad however. Indeed, a number of them were of value to the modern physician. Cures, Dr. Appleby continued, were where the danger of the “Quack” arose. Through simple cures he might think himself capable of effecting others that were away out of his reach in the medical field. A number of instances of quackery had been found even in smaller country districts, though the stamping ground for the bigger “quacks” were the larger city areas. One of the notable examples in the world of quackery was the American Elisha Perkins, who studied medicine and was a qualified medico. In the course of his work he noted that when a muscle was touched with a steel instrument it cringed, and from this he got an idea that he could with magnetism, withdraw pain from the body, so he set to and invented a thing called the ‘Perkin’s Tractor’ which consisted of two pieces of mixed metal which he sold ' at 5 guineas, but which he constructed at a cost of 1/-. He was reputed to have cured many illnesses 'with the appliance and had even the educated people of America believing that he could withdraw pain and disease with the contraption.

However, this gadget was copied by two Englishmen, who obtained the same cures with their tractors and made money at it. The only difference in construction was that their machines were made of wood, and painted a similar coolur. A man called Abraham, an American professor, invented a contraption called “Abraham’s Box,” which he claimed could, with a drop of the patient’s blood in it, tell the nature of i the disease. A similar case to this came up in Aufckland in recent years with the same type of “box” though it could only define cancer. The police soon confounded this machine by placing blood from various animals in it and it diagnosed quite a high percentage of cancer.

But, Dr Appleby concluded,, a lot of good could come out of quack beginnings and if the medical profession were to accept some, only some, of the so-called quack’s teaching there would, in-all probability, be not so many patients in the hospitals today.