#scrofula

[roehenstart]

King Louis IX Healing the Scrofula. By Louis Licherie de Beurie.

[whencyclopedia]

King's Evil

The king’s evil (from the Latin morbus regius meaning royal sickness), more commonly known as scrofula or medically tuberculous lymphadenitis, was a skin disease believed to be cured by the touch of the monarch as part of their inherited divine powers. The idea that the royal touch, a simple layi...

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[physiologicdeadspace]

Symptoms of lupus and scrofula, two diseases characterised by tubercles or nodular outgrowths, depicted in 14 labeled figures.

Tardieu, Ambroise, 1788-1841

Original image in: Rayer, Pierre François Olive, 1793-1867. Traité théorique et pratique des maladies de la peau (Paris : Chez J. B. Bailliere, 1835). 

Traité théorique et pratique des maladies de la peau, Pierre-François Olive Rayer's three-volume work on skin diseases, was first published in 1826 and received with acclaim. For the second edition, published in 1835, the work was completely revised and accompanied by an atlas with 26 finely detailed, hand-colored plates engraved by Ambroise Tardieu. Tardieu was a renowned engraver and cartographer of his day.

[lepromatosis]

The Diseases of Children, Vol. IV  by Meinhard von Pfaundler, Arthur Schlossmann, Henry Shaw, and Edford La Fétra, 1908

[parafrazerofhistory]

A Bulgarian Remedy for Scrofula

“In Bulgaria, when a person suffers from a congenital malady such as scrofula, a popular cure is to take him to a neighbouring village and there make him creep naked thrice through an arch, which is formed by inserting the lower ends of two vine branches in the ground and joining their upper ends together. When he has done so he hangs his clothes on a tree, and dons other garments. On his way home the patient must also crawl under a ploughshare, which is held high enough to let him pass.” [1]

—J. G. Frazer, Balder the Beautiful, part 2 (The Golden Bough, vol. XI, 1913, p. 180)

A young man with scrofula (mycobacterial cervical lymphadenitis).

(Source: Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

[1] Frazer’s footnote: “A. Strausz, Die Bulgaren (Leipsic, 1898), p. 414.”

[soul-cake-duck]

hey, so you know in the colour of magic when death can’t come for rincewind so ‘scrofula’ shows up instead?

yeah turns out scrofula is an ACTUAL ILLNESS CAUSED BY TB

[titleknown]

Cursed Mario Headcanon: Princess Peach's touch can actually cure scrofula.

[minervacasterly]

... the heirs of St. Edward the Confessor were said to have a healing touch. And was she [Queen Anne] not i in the direct line of Kings? Some sovereigns had practiced the healing touch. Henry III was one. Edward I and II were others; and it was Edward III whose alchymist Raymond Lully actually made gold for him. On the coins he made were impressed the figures of angels and these coins were supposed too have a healing power and out they were bound on the arms of those who suffered from scrofula by royal hands the patients were said to be healed. Scrofula had become known as the King's Evil, and this practice which ensured the popularity of sovereigns, was known as touching for the King's Evil. To have suffered brought to her that she might cure then was a blessing Anne could bestow on her subjects.

COURTING HER HIGHNESS by Jean Plaidy

A good short history lesson from Jean Plaidy (real name Eleanor Hibbert) there.