CO commentary on this case:
Case of Polydore: material facts are that he took advantage of Jane Harry’s credulity to persuade her that he could relieve her brother’s disease. He then got her to pay him money and food, in exchange performing “certain foolish ceremonies not perhaps ill calculated to impress her, and them, with a conviction and an awe of his supernatural forces. But he used this influence over their minds to encourage hope, and not to produce alarm, and excepting the form and circumstances of his proceedings, he does not seem to have differed much from those Empyrics who in every part of the world, and in every age (our own Country and times not excepted) have thriven upon the credulity and alarms of the sick, or upon the weakness and anxiety of their kindred and friends. Although Polydore explained the disease of Jane Henry’s brother by asserting that “he had his shadow in the Cotton Tree, and his hand nailed to it” &c., yet there is no proof or suggestion that the sick man himself had been told by Polydore either before, or during his illness, that such was cause of it. The man is not stated to have fallen ill by any such morbid excitement of his feeing, altho’ being ill, his relatives received this explanation as essential to the account which Polydore gave them of the efficacy of the pretended remedy. In short it appears to have been a mere case of quackery, with the substitution of conjuration for drugs.”