Part 21

But even if undesigning chance did happen to hit upon a mixture which possessed such marvellous virtues, what foundation was there, he asked, for believing that any other fortuitous concourse of ingredients would be similarly successful? This preparation had scarcely continued the same for a hundred years at a time. According to Celsus, who first described it, it consisted of thirty-eight simples. Before the time of Nero five of these had been struck out and twenty new ones added. Andromachus omitted six and added twenty-eight; leaving seventy-five net. Aetius in the fifth century, and Myrepsus in the twelfth gave very different accounts of it, and since then the formulas had been constantly fluctuating. Some of the original ingredients were, Dr. Heberden said, utterly unknown in his time; others could only be guessed at. About a century previously a dispute about Balm of Gilead, which was one of the constituents, had been referred to the Pope, who, however, prudently declined to exercise his infallibility on this subject.

Authorities were not agreed whether it was better old or new. Galen said the virtue of the opium was mitigated by keeping; Juncker said it fermented, and by fermentation the power of the opium was exalted three or fourfold.

A PHARMACEUTICAL POPE.

Peter of Spain, a native of Lisbon, was a physician who became Pope under the title of John XXI. He died in 1277. He wrote a treatise on medicine, or rather made a collection of formulas, including most of the absurd ones then current and adding a few of his own. One was to carry about a parchment on which were written the names of Gaspard, Balthasar, and Melchior, the three wise men of the East, as a sure preservative from epilepsy. Another was a method of curing a diarrhœa by filling a human bone with the excrements of a patient, and throwing it into a river. The diarrhœa would cease when the bone was emptied of its contents.

HENRY VIII (OF ENGLAND)

was fond of dabbling with medicine. In Brewer’s history of his reign, referring to the years 1516-18, we are told:--

“The amusements of court were diversified by hunting and out-door sports in the morning; in the afternoon by Memo’s music, by the consecration and distribution of cramp rings, or the invention of plasters and compounding of medicines, an occupation in which the King took unusual pleasure.”

In the British Museum among the Sloane MSS. there is one numbered 1047, entitled Dr. Butt’s Diary, which records many of these pharmaceutical achievements of the monarch. Dr. Butt was the King’s physician and was no doubt his guide in these experiments. Dr. Butt, or Butts, is referred to in Strype’s “Life of Cranmer” and in Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII.” Many of the liniments and cataplasms formulated are for excoriations or ulcers in the legs, a disease, as Dr. Brewer notes, “common in those days, and from which the King himself suffered.”

Among the contents of the Diary are “The King’s Majesty’s own Plaster.” It is described as a plaster devised by the king to heal ulcers without pain. It was a compound of pearls and guaiacum wood. There are in the manuscript formulas for other plasters “devised by the King at Greenwich and made at Westminster” to heal excoriations, to heal swellings in the ankles, one for my lady Anne of Cleves “to mollify and resolve, comfort and cease pain of cold and windy causes”; and an ointment to cool and “let” (prevent) inflammations, and take away itch.

Other formulas by Dr. Butt himself, and by other contemporary doctors, are comprised in this Diary.

Sir H. Halford, in an article “On the Deaths of Some Eminent Persons,” printed in 1835, says of Henry VIII, who died of dropsy at the age of 56, that he was “a great dabbler in physic, and offered medical advice on all occasions which presented themselves, and also made up the medicines.”

QUEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND

appears to have been an amateur prescriber. Etmuller states that she sent a formula for a “cephalica-cardiac medicine” to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, himself a dabbler in various scientific quackeries. It consisted of amber, musk, and civet, dissolved in spirit of roses. It is further on record that the English queen selected doctors and pharmacists for Ivan the Terrible of Russia. In Wadd’s Memorabilia, one of her Majesty’s quarter’s bills from her apothecary, Hugo Morgan, is quoted. It amounted to £83 7_s._ 8_d._, and included the following items:--A confection made like manus Christi with bezoar stone and unicorn’s horn, 11_s._; a royal sweetmeat with incised rhubarb, 1_s._ 4_d._; rose water for the king of Navarre’s ambassador, 1_s._; a conserve of barberries with preserved damascene plums, and other things for Mr. Ralegh, 6_s._; sweet scent to be used at the christening of Sir Richard Knightley’s son, 2_s._

THE QUEEN OF HUNGARY’S WATER.

Rosemary has at times enjoyed a high reputation among medicinal herbs. Arnold of Villa Nova affirms that he had often seen cancers, gangrenes, and fistulas, which would yield to no other medicine, dry up and become perfectly cured by frequently bathing them with a spirituous infusion of rosemary. His disciple, Raymond Lully, extracted the essential oil by distillation.

The name probably assisted the fame of the plant. In the middle ages it was believed to be associated with the Virgin. It was in fact derived from Ros and Maris, meaning Dew of the Sea; probably because it grew near the shores of the Mediterranean.

“Here’s rosemary for you; that’s for remembrance.” So says Ophelia in Hamlet; and many other poets and chroniclers relate how the plant was used at funerals and weddings as a symbol of constancy. It is supposed that this signification arose from the medicinal employment of rosemary to improve the memory. It may easily have happened, however, that the medicinal use followed the emblematical idea.

Old books and some modern ones tell the legend of the Queen of Hungary and her rosemary remedy. It is alleged in pharmaceutical treatises published in the nineteenth century that a document is preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, dated 1235, and written by Queen Elisabeth of Hungary, thus expressed:--

“I, Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary, being very infirm and much troubled with gout, in the seventy-second year of my age, used for a year this recipe given to me by an ancient hermit, whom I never saw before nor since; and was not only cured but recovered my strength, and appeared to all so remarkably beautiful that the King of Poland asked me in marriage, he being a widower and I a widow. I, however, refused him for the love of my Lord Jesus Christ, from one of whose angels I believe I received the remedy.”

The royal formula is as follows:--“Take aqua vitae, four times distilled, 3 parts; the tops and flowers of rosemary, 2 parts; put these together in a closed vessel, let them stand in a gentle heat fifty hours, and then distil them. Take one teaspoonful of this in the morning once every week, and let your face and diseased limb be washed with it every morning.”

Beckmann investigated this story and came to the conclusion that the name “Eau de La Reine d’Hongrie” had been adopted by some vendors of a spirit of rosemary “in order to give greater consequence and credit to their commodity”; in other words, he suggests that the interesting narrative was only a clever advertisement.

The only Queen Elisabeth of Hungary was the wife of King Charles Robert, and daughter of Ladislaus, King of Poland. She died in 1380, and for more than ten years before that date either her brother, Casimir II, or her son Louis, was the reigning sovereign in Poland, and neither of these can be supposed to have been her suitor. The alleged date of the document quoted would better suit St. Elisabeth of Hungary, and some old writers attribute the formula and the story to her. But she was never queen of Hungary, and moreover she died in 1231 at the age of 25. Beckmann also denies the statement that the document pretended to be in Queen Elisabeth’s writing is preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna. The whole narrative is traced to a German named Hoyer, in 1716, and he apparently copied it from a French medical writer named Prevot, who published it in 1659. Prevot attributes the story to “St. Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary,” and says he copied both the history and the formula from an old breviary in the possession of his friend, Francis Podacather, a Cyprus nobleman, who had inherited it from his ancestors. This is the one little possibility of truth in the record, for it appears that Queen Elisabeth of Hungary did mention two breviaries in her will, and it may have been that one of these was the one which the Cyprus nobleman possessed.

THE ROYAL TOUCH.--THE KING’S EVIL.

There are several instances in ancient history illustrating the healing virtue residing or alleged to reside in the person of a king. Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, according to Plutarch, cured colics and affections of the spleen by laying patients on their backs and passing his great toe over their bodies. Suelin relates that when the Emperor Vespasian was at Alexandria a poor blind man came to him saying that the god Serapis had revealed to him that if he, the Emperor, would touch his eyes with his spittle, his sight would be restored. Vespasian was angry and would have driven the man away, but some of those around him urged him to exercise his power, and at last he consented and cured the poor man of his blindness and some others of lameness. Cœlius Spartianus declares that the Emperor Adrian cured dropsy by touching patients with the tips of his fingers. The Eddas tell how King Olaf healed the wounds of Egill, the Icelandic hero, by laying on of hands and singing proverbs. A legend of the counts of Hapsburg declares that at one time they could cure a sick person by kissing him.

The superstition crystallised itself in the practice of the English and French kings of touching for the cure of scrofula, or king’s evil as the disease consequently came to be named. The term scrofula is itself one of the curiosities of etymology. Scrofula is the diminutive of scrota, a sow, and means a little pig. It is conjectured that the name was adopted from the idea of pigs burrowing under the surface of straw and likening to that the pig’s back sort of shape of the ulcers characteristic of the disease.

The first English king who undertook this treatment, so far as is known, was Edward the Confessor, who reigned from 1042 to 1066. But there is evidence that the French kings had practised it earlier. Robert the Pious (970-1031), son of Hughes Capet, is said to have exercised the miraculous power, and Church legend goes back five hundred years before this, attributing the origin of the gift to the date of the conversion of Clovis, A.D. 496. On that occasion the holy oil for the coronation of the Conqueror was brought direct from heaven in a phial carried by a dove, and the healing faculty was conferred at the same time. Most of the French kings down to Louis XV continued to touch, and it was even suggested that the practice should be resumed by Louis XVIII after the Restoration in 1815, but that monarch’s advisers prudently resolved that it would not do to risk the ridicule of modern France.

The records of Edward the Confessor’s miraculous feats of healing are obtained from William of Malmesbury, who wrote his Chronicles in the first half of the 12th century, about a hundred years after the Confessor’s reign. The earliest printed edition of the Chronicles appeared in 1577, and Shakespeare undoubtedly drew from it the description of the ceremony which is given in Macbeth (Act iv, Sc. 3). Malcolm and Macduff are represented as being in England “in a room of the King’s palace” (Edward the Confessor’s). The doctor tells them

There are a crew of wretched souls That stay his cure: their malady convinces The great assay of art; but at his touch-- Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand-- They presently amend.

Asked about the nature of the disease the doctor says “’Tis called the evil,” and he adds

How he solicits Heaven Himself best knows: but strangely visited people, All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures, Hanging a golden stamp about their necks, Put on with holy prayers: and ’tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves The healing benediction.

There is no evidence that any of the Norman kings performed the rite, but it is on record that Henry II performed cures by touching, and allusions to the practice by Edward II, Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV have been found in old manuscripts. It is probable, too, that the other kings preceding the Tudors followed the fashion when the interval between their wars gave them the necessary leisure. From Henry VII to Queen Anne all our rulers except Cromwell “touched.” Oliver, not being able to claim the virtue by reason of his descent, would certainly not have been trusted, and Dutch William had no sympathy with the superstition. It is recorded of him that once he yielded to importunity and went through the form of touching. “God gave thee better health and more sense” was the unsentimental benediction he pronounced. Queen Anne, as is well known, “touched” Dr. Johnson in his childhood, but it is recorded that in this case no cure was effected. Boswell says that Johnson’s mother in taking the child (who was then between two and three years old) to London for the ceremony was acting on the advice of Sir John Floyer, who was at that time a noted physician at Lichfield. The “touch-piece” presented by Queen Anne to Dr. Johnson is preserved in the British Museum. The Pretender, Charles Edward, touched someone at Holyrood House, Edinburgh, and his partisans said a cure was effected in three weeks. Which proved his right to the throne of England.

The story told by William of Malmesbury about Edward the Confessor is that “a young woman that had a husband about the same age as herself, but no child, was afflicted with overflowing of humours in her neck, which broke out in great nobbs, was commanded in a dream to apply to the King to wash it. To court she goes, and the King being at his Devotions all alone dip’d his fingers in water and dabbel’d the woman’s neck, and he had no sooner taken away his hand than she found herself better.” William goes on to tell that within a week she was well, and that within a year she was brought to bed of twins.

Modern doctors have forgotten and despised the strange story of this royal touch, but two and three centuries ago they very seriously discussed it. Reports of marvellous and numerous cures were confidently related, and the writers who had no faith in the virtue of the performance admitted the genuineness of many of the cases. Sergeant-Surgeon Dickens, Queen Anne’s surgeon, narrated the most curious instance. At the request of one young woman he brought her to the Queen to be touched. After the performance he impressed upon her the importance of never parting with the gold medal which was given to all patients; for it appears that he had reason to expect that she was likely to sell it. She promised always to retain it, and in due course she was cured. In time, thinking all risk had passed, she disposed of the touch-piece; the disease returned; she confessed her fault penitently to Dr. Dickens, and by his aid was touched again, and once more cured. Surgeon Wiseman, chief surgeon in Charles I’s army, and afterwards Sergeant-Surgeon in Charles II’s household, described the cures effected by that monarch. He had been an eye-witness of hundreds of cures, he says. Many other testimonies of the same kind might be quoted, but it is as well to remark that a habit grew up of describing the touching itself as a cure.

Careful and intelligent inquiries into the alleged success of the practice by investigators who were by no means believers in any actual royal virtue, but who yet admitted unhesitatingly the reality of many of the claimed cures, are on record. Among treatises of this character may be mentioned “A Free and Impartial Inquiry into the Antiquity and Efficacy of Touching for the King’s Evil,” by William Beckett, F.R.S., a well known surgeon, 1722, and “Criterion, or Miracles Examined,” by Dr. Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, 1754. Both of these writers adm