The earliest notice in print is John Feltham's, in his Tour through the Island of Mann of 1798, who listed among the principal residents of Kirk Andreas Mr John Tear of Ballawhane and added that this gentleman's family had long been in possession of some valuable medicinal preparations, which they liberally distributed to the relief of the poor. That is the whole of it, and it is the only eighteenth-century notice of the family that has been found. Half a century later Joseph Train, gathering material for his Historical and Statistical Account of 1845, found that fairy doctors were still employed throughout the Island, though a Wesleyan preacher named Corjaig had affirmed some years before that he had watched all the fairies of the Island leave Douglas bay in empty rum puncheons, scudding before the wind towards Jamaica. At Ballayochie eye-biting in man or beast had been cured until lately, at Ballasalla there lived a very extensive dealer in propitiatory charms, but the most noted of all was Mr Teare of Ballawhane in the parish of Andreas, who was applied to when the prescriptions of the other practitioners had failed. The messenger sent to him was neither to eat nor drink by the way, nor to tell any person his mission, and the recovery was said to be perceptible from the time the case was stated to him.

Train met him. In the spring, he wrote, farmers would suspend sowing for days rather than commit the seed to the soil without the doctor's benediction, and at Laxey in July 1833 the innkeeper Fargher had asked him to rid a wheat field of sparrows, which he did by performing some ceremonious rites in the field, after which the paper-makers and miners who watched it for the rest of the season saw the birds flock round it without one daring to enter. Train described the seer as a little man far advanced into the vale of life, healthy and active, in a low-crowned slouched hat too large for his head, with coat, vest, breeches, stockings and shoes all of undyed loaghtyn wool. Mr Kelly, the chief magistrate of Castletown, introduced them at the inn at Port St Mary and made Teare swear before him that he never called evil spirits to his assistance, and the two then spent the evening together. The doctor said the crab that lies always in its hole is never fat, told stories of persons born with the caul, and held that the failure of the seed potatoes that summer was the malevolence of the fairies, since all the potatoes he had taken under his protection had vegetated vigorously. At parting he advised Train to carry the cross-bone from the head of a bollan fish, which would keep him from straying on the mountain roads by day or night.

A. W. Moore, in 1891, set the practitioners in their place. When the ordinary remedies against witchcraft and the evil eye failed, recourse was had to the charmers or witch-doctors, fer-obbee and ben-obbee, men and women who used formulas and ceremonies to cure diseases and occasionally to cause them, and who counteracted the spells of fairies and of witches alike. They administered herbs and applied fasting spittle, and for the more recondite branch of their profession used charms and incantations. All of them were more or less suspected of dabbling in sorcery on their own account, but as their powers were on the whole used for good they were tolerated. The powers were held to be hereditary, and to keep them intact they had to pass from a man to a woman and in the next generation from a woman to a man. A daughter of Teare's was still practising, and the fishermen went to her to have their nets charmed. John Rhys heard the same descent rule, father to daughter and daughter to son, in 1891, and recorded a charmer near Kirk Michael who gave fishermen a packet of herbs to boil and sprinkle over the boat, telling them plainly that he could not put the fish in their nets but could remove any mischief in the way of their luck. The Andreas charmer he heard of cut up wormwood, or cabbage sprouts when there was none, sent the crier round Peel to announce his arrival, and died in poverty at Ramsey. Moore's Manx Worthies of 1901 put the Teares of Ballawhane beside the Clucases of the Strang in Braddan, bone-setters through three generations, and two women bone-setters of Andreas and Douglas, as the Island's herbalists, fairy doctors and bone-setters.