The king's evil.

  • Crawfurd, Raymond Henry Payne, Sir, 1865-1938.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The king's evil. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    his hand, and signed them with the Cross in deep humility. His father, Philip, while in full exercise of this glorious miracle, fell under some reproach or other, and lost the power. I say nothing as to the practice of other kings in this matter. Still I know that the English king makes no attempt to do likewise.] Guibert's testimony is so precise as to establish be- yond all question that both Philip I (1061-1108 a.d.) and Louis VI (1108-1137 a. d.) did actually touch for the cure of scrofula, the disease soon to acquire the sobriquet of the ' King's Evil'. The whole language of Guibert suggests that in his time the custom was already firmly established in France, and the applicants for healing numerous, and as but one reign, that of Henry I (1031- 1060 a. d.), intervened between Robert the Pious and Philip I, it would seem probable that Robert's patients were also scrofulous. No word in the whole of medical terminology has been more ill-used than the word ' scrofula'. Who can say what the word denotes to-day, unless we may fall back on the French mot, ' On devient tubercnleux, mats on nait scrofuleux'7 To early medical writers, how- ever, at least as far back as the fourth century a. d., it had a clear and definite significance. It was the form of 'struma' that affected the glands of the neck, and Aetius, Paulus of Aegina, Johannicius, and others, had defined ' struma' as enlargement and induration of the glands, and their dictum was law. The word 'scrofula' is undoubtedly derived from 'scrofa', which Juvenal,1 among others, uses for a sow; and any one who will casually observe the prominent submaxillary pouches of the sow, will see an obvious reason for the name. Yet various writers have spent their ingenuity in elaborating the most far-fetched explanations, some 1 Satirae, vi. 177.