But the
task is difficult, and after all, tombstones yield but cheerless
reading. That the sleepers in the Potter's Field very often had not
even that shelter of tombstones makes their stories the more elusive
and the more melancholy. One or two slight records stand out among the
rest, notably the curious one attached to the last of the stones to be
removed from Washington Square. I believe that it was in 1857 that Dr.
John Francis, in an address before the Historical Society of New York,
told this odd story, which must here be only touched upon.
One Benjamin Perkins, "a charlatan believer in mesmeric influence,"
plied his trade in early Manhattan. He seems to have belonged to that
vast army of persons who seriously believe their own teachings even
when they know them to be preposterous. Perkins made a specialty of
yellow fever, and insisted that he could cure it by hypnotism. That he
had a following is in no way strange, considering his day and
generation, but the striking point about this is that, when he was
exposed to the horror himself, he tried to automesmerise himself
out of it.
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