“I can feel the heat, but I can’t see the stove in that chair,” was his droll reply.
The professor could make this gentleman forget his name, but could not make him believe that “a silk hat was a basin of water.”
The Royal Touch.
The old ignorant kings and queens were said to remove the scrofula (king’s evil) by the touch. Gouty old Queen Anne was the last to exercise the royal prerogative to any extent.
A scrofulous development is the result of imperfect action, and obstruction of some one or more of the five excretory organs of the human system. These are the skin (or glands of the same), the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, and the colon. The most that the regular physician does in scrofula (or one who is not a specialist in this branch of physic) is to attend to the general health of the patient of a scrofulous diathesis, build up the strength, and endeavor to increase the vitality. This in a measure tends to reduce the scrofulous development. Now, will not a child sleeping continually with an aged person or invalid tend to reduce the vitality of the child? Yes, it absorbs the disease of the one, while the vitality is thrown off for the benefit of the weaker person. Here, you see, one person may partake of the vitality of another by touch. Then may not the continued touch of a healthy person (king or subject) affect the health of a weaker, on the principle of increased vitality?
But it really removes no cause, hence cannot take the place of an alterative, or anti-scrofulous medicine. The “crew of wretched souls” who waited the king’s touch really believed that he “solicits Heaven.” Hence the cure. The coin which he hung about the neck of these “strangely visited people, all swollen and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,” called their attention continually to “the healing benediction.”
Pyrrhus, who was placed upon the throne by force of arms B. C. 306, was said to cure the “evil” by the “grace of God.” Valentine, who only held his throne—A. D. 375—by the help of Theodosius, not by the “grace of God”—claimed to cure scrofula by the latter power, as did Valentine II., whose wicked temper ended his life in a “fit of passion.”
The subject of the following sketch claimed also divine power:—
Herr Gassner. “The Devil understands Latin.”
It seems from the following truthful account of Herr Gassner, a clergyman at Elwangen, that the devil can understand Latin, as well as “quote Scripture.” About the year 1758 this clergyman became so celebrated in curing diseases by animal magnetism, that the people came flocking from Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Swabia, in great numbers, to be cured of all sorts of ailments, a thousand persons arriving at a time, who had to lodge in tents, as the town could not lodge them all.