John Haygarth
John Haygarth
Life
Haygarth was born to William Haygarth and Magdalen Metcalfe at
Medicine
Haygarth spent 30 years at Chester and became known as one of the best physicians of his time. Like
In 1778 Haygarth helped found the Smallpox Society of Chester; the group advocated inoculation, an unpopular position at the time, and tried to educate the populace so as to avoid casual contraction of the disease. Only four years after this effort began, Chester's smallpox mortality rate had been reduced by almost 50%. Soon other towns, such as Leeds and Liverpool, adopted the Society's methods. They were assisted by his Inquiry how to Prevent the Small Pox (1784) which included statistical calculations supported by John Dawson. The book was translated into French and German and made Haygarth an internationally known figure. He further elaborated his ideas in Sketch of a plan to exterminate the casual small pox from Great Britain and to introduce general inoculation (1793). Unfortunately, his plan to inspect homes and provide general inoculation was resisted in the increasingly conservative 1790s. For his important work on smallpox, Haygarth was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1781.[4]
Haygarth did not abandon his research into fever patients, however. He performed several experiments and determined that separating fever patients within a hospital reduced mortality rates. When his plan was put into effect in Chester in 1783, the first fever wards in Britain, all except one of the 30 fever patients recovered. The following year, his precautions helped to stop the spread of typhus in the town. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1789.[5]
In 1798 Haygarth moved to
Perkins' tractors
In 1799, Haygarth[6] investigated the efficacy of medical instruments called "Perkins tractors". These were metal pointers which were supposedly able to "draw out" disease. They were sold at the extremely high price of five guineas, and Haygarth set out to show that the high cost was unnecessary. He did this by comparing the results from dummy wooden tractors with a set of allegedly "active" metal tractors, and published his findings in a book On the Imagination as a Cause & as a Cure of Disorders of the Body.[7]
The wooden pointers were just as useful as the expensive metal ones, showing "to a degree which has never been suspected, what powerful influence upon diseases is produced by mere imagination".[8] While the word placebo had been used since 1772, this was the first real demonstration of the placebo effect.
Haygarth recognised this is the reason why famous doctors are often more successful than unknowns. He even went on to suggest that much medicine of the day relied on the placebo effect.
Death
Haygarth died at Lambridge House near Bath on 10 June 1827, and was buried at Swainswick church in Somerset. A ward at the Chester Infirmary was named after him and a Haygarth medal was established for the best nurse in the hospital.[9]
See also
Notes
- ^ Stephen, Leslie; Lee, Sidney, eds. (1891). . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 25. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 294.
- OCLC 1157926819.
- ^ "Haygarth, John (HGRT759J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ^ "Lists of Royal Society Fellows 1660–2007". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 24 March 2010. Retrieved 16 July 2010.
- ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter H" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
- S2CID 208293370.
- ^ Haygarth, J., Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors, and Epidemical Convulsions Archived 15 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine, Crutwell, (Bath), 1800.
- ^ Wootton, David. Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates. Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press (2004). Retrieved on 23 July 2007.