The King's Evil
The royal touch for scrofula, and a disease that heals itself.
In the Texts
The kings of England and France touched for scrofula from the eleventh century to the eighteenth, and the touch-pieces, the gold angels hung at the neck after the rite, are in the Materia Medica with the cramp-rings the English kings blessed on Good Friday. The theory was the sacred character of anointed kingship; the demonologists cite it as a lawful wonder beside the unlawful ones.
What Medicine Makes of It
Scrofula is tuberculous lymphadenitis of the neck, which swells, softens, discharges, and in most cases heals with scarring over months or years without treatment; the physicians who certified patients for the rite watched that course and credited the king. Bloch (1924) wrote the history and saw the mechanism: a remitting disease, uncounted failures, and the explanation that the unimproved lacked faith. Charles II touched some 90,000; Johnson, touched by Anne in 1712, carried the scars and the gold piece all his life.
The Evidence
- Marc Bloch’s Les rois thaumaturges (1924) is the founding study: the rite ran in England from Edward the Confessor’s legend to Queen Anne (1714) and in France to Charles X (1825), and Charles II alone touched some 90,000 people, 6,725 in his first year by the register.
- Scrofula is tuberculous lymphadenitis of the neck, which in the untreated runs a course of swelling, softening, discharge through the skin, and scarring over months to years, and often heals on its own; the physician who certified the patient for the touch and the gold angel saw the natural history and credited the king.
- Bloch himself noted that the rite’s reputation survived because the disease remitted, because a touched patient who did not improve was said to lack faith, and because the cases were never counted against the failures.
- Samuel Johnson was touched by Queen Anne in 1712 as a child of two and kept the gold touch-piece all his life; his scrofula left him scarred and nearly blind in one eye, which is to say it ran its course.
- The gold touch-piece is the amulet reading’s case in a royal setting: a token of the rite, worn as the cure.
Where They Part
The rite claimed a power in the king; the disease claimed a course of its own. The touch-piece is the amulet reading in a royal setting, and the rite the clearest historical case of a cure built on natural history.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Bloch, M. (1924). Les rois thaumaturges; trans. Anderson, The Royal Touch (1973).
- Barlow, F. (1980). “The King’s Evil.” English Historical Review 95.
- Brogan, S. (2015). The Royal Touch in Early Modern England. Boydell.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.