NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 153 



But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miraculous gift 

 is found in the case of Charles II, the most thoroughly cynical 

 debauchee who ever sat on the English throne before the advent 

 of George IV. He touched nearly one hundred thousand per- 

 sons, and the outlay for gold medals issued to the afflicted on these 

 occasions rose in some years as high as ten thousand pounds. 

 John Brown, surgeon in ordinary to his Majesty and to St. 

 Thomas's Hospital, and author of many learned works on sur- 

 gery and anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the 

 touch of this monarch ; and Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes 

 an entire book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, " I 

 myself have been frequent witness to many hundreds of cures 

 performed by his Majesty's touch alone without any assistance 

 of chirurgery, and these many of them had tyred out the en- 

 deavours of able chirurgeons before they came thither." Yet 

 it is especially instructive to note that while in no other reign 

 were so many people touched for scrofula, and in none were so 

 many cures vouched for, in no other reign did so many people 

 die of that disease : the bills of mortality show this clearly, and 

 the reason doubtless is the general substitution of supernatural 

 for scientific means of cure. This is but one out of many exam- 

 ples showing the havoc which a scientific test always makes 

 among miracles if men allow it to be applied. 



To James II the same power continued ; and if it be said, in 

 the words of Lord Bacon, that " imagination is next of kin to 

 miracle a working faith," something else seems required to ac- 

 count for the testimony of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought by the 

 royal touch upon babes in their mothers' arms. Myth-making 

 and marvel-mongering were evidently at work here as in so many 

 other places, and so great was the fame of these cures that we 

 find, in the year before James was dethroned, a pauper at Ports- 

 mouth, New Hampshire, petitioning the General Assembly to 

 enable him to make the voyage to England in order that he 

 might be healed by the royal touch. 



The change in the royal succession does not seem to have inter- 

 fered with the miracle; for, though William III evidently re- 

 garded the whole thing as a superstition, and on one occasion is 

 said to have touched a patient, saying to him, " God give you bet- 

 ter health and more sense," Winston assures us that this person 

 was healed, notwithstanding William's incredulity. 



As to Queen Anne, Dr. Daniel Turner, in his Art of Surgery, 

 relates that several cases of scrofula which had been unsuccess- 

 fully treated by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard, sergeant-sur- 

 geon to her Majesty, yielded afterward to the efficacy of the 

 Queen's touch. Naturally does Collier, in his Ecclesiastical His- 

 tory, say regarding these cases that to dispute them " is to come 



