Note 17.5 — PSYCHE’S TASK

Touching for the King’s Evil. Perhaps the last relic of such superstitions which lingered about our English kings was the notion that they could heal scrofula by their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the King’s Evil;17.5 and on the analogy of the Polynesian superstitions which I have cited, we may perhaps conjecture that the skin disease of scrofula was originally supposed to be caused as well as cured by the king’s touch. Certain it is that in Tonga some forms of scrofula, as well as indurations of the liver, to which the natives were very subject, were thought to be caused by touching a chief and to be healed, on homœopathic principles, in the very same fashion.18.1 Similarly in Loango palsy is called the king’s disease, because the negroes imagine it to be heaven’s own punishment for treason meditated against the king.18.2 The belief in the king’s power to heal by touch is known to have been held both in France and England from the eleventh century onward. The first French king to touch the sick appears to have been Robert the Pious, the first English king Edward the Confessor.18.3 In England the belief that the king could heal scrofula by his touch survived into the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson was touched in his childhood for scrofula by Queen Anne.18.4 It is curious that so typical a representative of robust common sense as Dr. Johnson should in his childhood and old age have thus been brought into contact with these ancient superstitions about royalty both in England and Scotland. In France the superstition lingered a good deal longer, for whereas Queen Anne was the last reigning monarch in England to touch for scrofula, both Louis XV. and Louis XVI. at their coronation touched thousands of patients, and as late as 1824 Charles X. at his coronation went through the same solemn farce. It is said that the sceptical wits of Louis XVI.’s time investigated all the cases of the persons on whom the king had laid hands at his coronation, with the result that out of two thousand four hundred who were touched only five were made whole.18.5