The King's Evil in Oxfordshire.

IN THE Seventeenth-century heyday of the Royal Touch, the Oxfordshire village of Stanton St. John felt amply the rigours of scrofula, the King's Evil. Its residents looked eagerly to the possibility of cure by the Touch. The practice of touching for scrofula by English sovereigns was performed from Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, while the Hanoverians by and large refrained from following in kind.' The exiled Stuarts, meanwhile, continued to accommodate applications tendered them, claiming Divine Right and pressing suit for return to their rightful position. The question of efficacy of the royal cure need not detain us unduly. Esmond R. Long, dealing some years ago with the question of the decline of tuberculosis,2 put this issue in its proper perspective. He pointed out that those patients who did not respond to the suggestion content ofthe touching ceremony would still, in all likelihood choose the least traumatic among a range of equally efficacious modes of therapy; heroic cures versus the king's golden angel or touch piece, bestowed with a prayer. Evidence bearing on the problem of therapeutic efficacy, in patients where no extant records indicate relapse, and where it seems likely that the actual pathology ranged over a variety of lymphadenitides, must therefore remain at best highly presumptive. But the historian may wish to extract from patient histories a more general sense of scrofula sufferers' subsequent state(s) of health. It would, therefore, be interesting to have information on the subsequent lifespan and the frequency of repeating-relapse followed by additional intervention in the form ofthe Touch. We should like to draw attention to a source of evidence for such a study which has apparently been used only infrequently by medical historians.3 English parish registers, such as those of Stanton St. John, provide records not only of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, but also the issuing by churchmen of certificates attesting to the eligibility of parishioners for the King's Touch. Such indigenous measures became necessary when the king was called upon to touch large numbers of patients in one session. Expenses were thereby also curtailed. The Rector was charged with the duty of ensuring a complement of properly needy patients, sufferers more desirous perhaps of the cure for their lymphadenitis than of Shakespeare's 'golden stamp about their necks'. The clergyman qualifies, then, as one of the earliest indigenous health officers concerned with the appropriate local distribution of health care. Published accounts of …