The Lit. Soc. broke new ground, drilling down on the specialist literature of the distant past when Dr. Stephen Brogan presented his study of Adenochoiradelogia, the 1684 text on the presentation and treatment of scrofula with particular reference to the application of the King’s Touch. The enigmatic title stands firmly in a tradition of medical neologism drawn from the Classical languages and is a three volume anatomick-chirurgical treatise on glands and swellings which explains their nature, describes the clinical presentation and discusses the therapeutic efficacy of contemporary treatments. For both speaker and audience, attention was centred on a specific treatment, the Charisma Basilikon or Royal Touch. The author, one of King Charles II’s surgeons, Thomas Browne, had a ringside seat at the application of the Royal Touch. Scrofula would now be technically described as tuberculous cervical adenitis i.e., the spread of tuberculosis to the lymph glands in the neck, with Dr Brogan attributing the infection to the ingestion of unpasteurised milk from cows with TB. The affected glands could present as swellings which increased in size and became red and tender before sometimes rupturing to form a sinus, a tract from the abscess cavity which opened onto the skin surface and along which pus was intermittently discharged. Nowadays an uncommon clinical condition to encounter but our speaker gave some insight into the medical challenge it posed with a display of 19 th century photographs and watercolours of afflicted patients.
Dr. Brogan emphasised the importance of context in considering illness and healing in the 17th century. Disease was then considered providential, sited at an intersection of religion, health and medicine; a philosophy which may explain the wide spectrum of healers on offer – physicians, apothecaries, barber-surgeons, cunning men, diet advocates and lifestyle coaches.
Tactile healing was not an exclusively royal preserve and the Irish
J.P., Valentine Greatrakes,attracted thousands of supplicants following his arrival in London in 1665. The busiest monarchical adept of the King’s Touch was Charles II whose production line of medical ministrations followed a seasonal calendar of Easter and Michaelmas, the latter coinciding with harvest time. During these 10-day seasons, the Merry Monarch touched 300 sufferers each morning and the events were trailed with advertisements in The London Gazette. Before participating in one of these sessions, the patient required a referral letter from his vicar confirming the scrofula diagnosis with the vicar being obliged to record the names of those he had referred. To attend the actual ceremony the patient had to collect an admission token from the surgeon’s house beforehand and we can only speculate at the febrile atmosphere which must have prevailed there from the diarist John Evelyn's description of seven deaths in the crush at one surgeon’s door. Lest we imagine that those submitting to the cure were drawn from a gullible underclass, aristocrats also underwent the process although they could avoid the frenzied scramble to acquire an admission token, being favoured with a domiciliary visit and personal delivery. The surprisingly modern bureaucracy which attended presenting yourself for the Touch was inspired by the contemporary fear of masterless men roaming the countryside and possibly, horror of horrors, becoming a charge on the Poor Law although two thirds of victims were actually women. The ceremonial choreography was thoughtfully arranged; the venue was the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, in front of which the King’s father had been executed by Cromwell’s regicidal republicans in 1649. Father and son shared a belief in the Divine Right of Kings, hankered after a French-style absolute monarchy and saw the ruler as the Lord’s Anointed, leaving only a small step to crediting him with supernatural powers; so, dispensing the Charisma Basilikon was a political endeavour for the Stuarts. Charles also took the religious element seriously as well, topping up the royal reservoir of spirituality by taking Communion beforehand and having prayers from St. John’s Gospel intoned throughout with the inspiration for the whole ceremony drawn from St. Mark: they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. St. Mark 16, v.18 (KJV) The king duly laid his hands on the lesions for 15 – 20 seconds. At a second phase of the ceremony the patient was given a gold coin known as an Angel, to be worn from a ribbon round the neck, which contained more of the royal metal, gold, than any other coin in circulation at that time. Nowadays one can fetch anything from £1,000 to £4,000 on eBay. On one face there was a depiction of St.Michael the Archangel killing a wyvern, representing the triumph of good over evil and by extension health over disease, while the obverse showed a ship at full sail coming towards the viewer, signifying a healthy body politic following the true course. The coin’s rubric read "Soli Dei Gloria" – The Glory of God
Alone. Charles II took Touching seriously and is estimated to have touched 100,000 people in his lifetime, probably seeing it as a conservative reaction to the regicide Republic/Commonwealth and the political malaise he felt accompanied it. Browne’s text reports a 75 patient case series, 5 of whom were healed within 2 to 3 days and another 30 improved over 4 to 6 weeks. As in modern medicine, managing expectations was important. Many sufferers were not expecting an overnight cure but wished to be heard on the subject of their misfortune and were prepared to settle for even a slow, incremental improvement. Evidence for a political dimension comes from the refusal of the Calvinist William III or the House of Hanover to continue the practice despite its revival under Queen Anne and its impressive historical lineage, dating back to Edward the Confessor.
As ever, the Lit. Soc. audience rose to the challenge of novelty, firing in a series of intelligent questions in the Q & A.
William Doherty
