The priests and magi of the ancient Druids possessed a wonderful faculty of healing. They were able to hypnotize their patients by the waving of a wand, and while under the spell of this procedure, the latter could tell what was happening afar off, being vested with the power of clairvoyance.
But the Druidic priests also effected cures by stroking with the hand, and this method was thought to be of special efficacy in rheumatic affections. They also employed other remedies which appealed to the imagination, such as various mesmeric charms and incantations.[76:1]
John Timbs remarks in "Doctors and Patients," that any person who claimed to possess the special gift of healing, was expected to demonstrate his ability by means of the touch; for this was the established method of testing the genuineness of any assumed or pretended curative powers. Among Eastern nations at the present time, European physicians are popularly credited with the faculty of healing by manual stroking or passes, and the same ideas prevail in remote communities of Great Britain. In the opinion of the author above mentioned, the belief in the transmission of remedial virtues by the hands is derived from the fact that these members are the usual agents in the bestowal of material benefits, as, for example, in almsgiving to the poor.
According to the popular view, royal personages were exalted above other people, "because they possessed a distinctive excellence, imparted to them at the hour of birth by the silent rulers of the night." In view of this belief, it was natural that sovereigns should be invested with extraordinary healing powers, and that they should be enabled, by a touch of the hand, to communicate to others an infinitesimal portion of the virtues with which they had been supernaturally endowed. These virtues dwelt also in the king's robes. Hence arose the belief in the miraculous power of healing by the imposition of royal hands.[77:1]
There is nothing that can cure the King's Evil,
But a Prince.
John Lyly (1553-1606), Euphues.
The treatment of scrofulous patients by the touch of a reigning sovereign's hand is believed to have originated in France. According to one authority, Clovis I (466-511) was the pioneer in employing this method of cure. Louis I (778-840) is reported to have added thereto the sign of the cross. The custom was in vogue during the reign of Philip I (1051-1108), but that monarch is said to have forfeited the power of healing, by reason of his immorality and profligacy.[77:2] During later medieval times the Royal Touch appears to have fallen into disuse in France, reappearing, however, in the reign of Louis IX (1215-1270), and we have the authority of Laurentius, physician to Henry IV, that Francis I, while a prisoner at Madrid after the battle of Pavia, in 1525, "cured multitudes of people daily of the Evil."
The Royal Touch was a prerogative of the kings of England from before the Norman Conquest until the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty, a period of nearly seven hundred years, and the custom affords a striking example of the power of the imagination and of popular credulity. The English annalist, Raphael Holinshed, wrote in 1577 concerning King Edward the Confessor (1004-1066), that he had the gift of healing divers ailments, and that "he used to help those that were vexed with the King's Evil, and left that virtue, as it were, a portion of inheritance, unto his successors, the kings of this realm."
But the earliest reference to this king as a healer by the touch was made by the English historian, William of Malmesbury (1095-1143), in his work, "De Gestis Regum Anglorum." The story, wrote Joseph Frank Payne, M.D., in "English Medicine in the Anglo-Saxon Times," has the familiar features of the legends and miracles of healing by the early ecclesiastics, saints, or kings, as they are found in the histories and chronicles from the time of Bede, the Venerable (673-735). But there appears to be no real historical evidence that Edward the Confessor was the first royal personage who healed by laying on of hands.
John Aubrey, in his "Miscellanies," asserts, on the authority of certain English chronicles, that in the reign of King Henry III (1206-1272), there lived a child who was endowed with the gift of healing, and whose touch cured many diseases. Popular belief, as is well known, ascribed this prerogative also to a seventh son.