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Updated: May 24, 2025
I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.
Statistics prove that over 30 per cent. of the children born alive perish within the first year. Outside of this frightful mortality, how many children are born, inheriting eruptions of the skin, foul ulcerations swelling of the bones, weak eyes or blindness, scrofula, idiocy, stunted growth, and finally insanity, all on account of the father's early vices.
Thus, the deposit of consumption encroaches on the proper substance of the lungs, and so lessens the area in which the blood is exposed to the air and purified: the deposit of scrofula around and in a joint interferes with its powers of movement.
"The custom of covering the faces of children with the bed-clothes," says the celebrated Florence Nightingale, "produces a large share of the cases of scrofula found among them."
The Tongans were subject to induration of the liver and certain forms of scrofula, which they often attributed to a failure to perform the requisite expiation after having inadvertently touched a chief or his belongings. Hence they often went through the ceremony as a precaution, without knowing that they had done anything to call for it.
Boswell's marvellous Life has made J.'s bodily appearance, dress, and manners more familiar to posterity than those of any other man the large, unwieldy form, the face seamed with scrofula, the purblind eyes, the spasmodic movements, the sonorous voice, even the brown suit, metal buttons, black worsted stockings, and bushy wig, the conversation so full of matter, strength, sense, wit, and prejudice, superior in force and sparkle to the sounding, but often wearisome periods of his written style.
An ordinary observer might scarcely notice it, and yet every one of her children has an approximation to the same peculiarity to some extent. If you look at the other extreme, too, the gravest diseases, such as gout, scrofula, and consumption, may be handed down with just the same certainty and persistence as we noticed in the perpetuation of the bandy legs of the Ancon sheep.
D.G. Dodge, late Superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, speaking of the causes leading to intemperance, after stating his belief that it is a transmissible disease, like "scrofula, gout or consumption," says: "There are men who have an organization, which may be termed an alcoholic idiosyncrasy; with them the latent desire for stimulants, if indulged, soon leads to habits of intemperance, and eventually to a morbid appetite, which has all the characteristics of a diseased condition of the system, which the patient, unassisted, is powerless to relieve since the weakness of the will that led to the disease obstructs its removal.
We have seen, for example, how in Tonga a man who happened to touch a sacred chief, or anything personally belonging to him, had to perform a certain ceremony before he could feed himself with his hands; otherwise it was believed that he would swell up and die, or at least be afflicted with scrofula or some other disease.
If weakened vitality were the only result, it would not be so serious a matter; but scrofula is soon fixed upon such constitutions, beginning with its milder form as in consumption, but ending in the absolute rottenness of bone and tissue.
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