Faith-healing and Christian Science / by Alice Feilding.

  • Feilding, Alice.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Faith-healing and Christian Science / by Alice Feilding. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    This royal curative gift appears to have been at its height of popularity in the reign of Charles 11., and the gay monarch ‘touched,’ according to the historians, near upon a hundred thousand persons during his twenty- five years of kingship.1 It is recorded that the days in which the ‘ touching ’ was to take place were fixed at the sittings of the Privy Council, and were solemnly notified by the clergy in their parish churches. The sufferers who wished to present themselves to their Sovereign had to obtain a recommendation from the minister or churchwarden of their parish, these individuals being enjoined to examine carefully into the cases before grant- ing a certificate. They then had often weeks 1 Touching for the Evil appears to have increased greatly after the Restoration. In the first four years of Charles’s reign nearly 24,000 persons were ‘ touched.’ Regulations had con- sequently to be drawn up in Council (1683) concerning these * Publick Healings,’ which were appointed to take place in the winter for the avoidance of contagion. The King’s surgeon wrote : ‘ I myself have been a frequent eye-witness of many hundreds of cures performed by His Majesty’s touch alone, without any aid from chirurgery.’ James 11. touched during one of his ‘ progresses ’ eight hun- dred persons in Chester Cathedral.