Word: scrofula
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...Accommodation. Common folk still sought a king's touch as the cure for scrofula, still believed that the twitching of a hazel twig betrayed the nearness of criminals, still looked to omens and cabalistic signs as a guide to the future. The Swedish poet Georg Stiernhielm was accused of witchcraft for burning a peasant's beard with a magnifying glass, and witches would continue to stalk the lands of Europe for as long as King Louis lived (Durant reports that in Scotland the last one was sent to the stake in 1722). But at the same time, Hooke...
...that has fascinated all historians-of reason beside unreason, of rationalism beside blind faith-was never more sharply apparent than in the century (1558-1648) from Elizabeth to Richelieu and from Shakespeare to Descartes. It was a time when superstition was rampant; a king's touch would cure scrofula, corpses bled in the presence of the murderer, comets signified disaster-although Galileo was calmly regarding the heavens through a telescope that magnified 1,000 times. Witchcraft (in which Kepler believed) was widespread: the Archbishop of Trier found it necessary to burn 120 of his fellow Germans on the ground...
...tumor. Though it is seldom seen today, a particularly common tumor among peasants of the Middle Ages, who lived close to their herds, was tuberculoma. This was often caused by the bacilli of bovine tuberculosis-the same bacteria that made the ruff fashionable to hide the swellings of scrofula ("the king's evil"). Since Joan's right-side perception was affected, the tumor would be in the left hemisphere of her brain...
...when they did, they consigned them to the women's wards. Commonest child's complaint was diarrhea. In those days, it was often fatal, frequently spread to patients throughout the wards. Innumerable youngsters were victims of malnutrition diseases such as rickets and scurvy, human or bovine tuberculosis (scrofula), malformations or infections of the bones, but few hospitals were equipped to deal with these maladies. Then three years after the Civil War had ended, a young veteran of Gettysburg returned to Boston from a postwar refresher tour of Europe's medical centers with a bold idea. To four...
...Shoemaker's Wife. Paris was used to such claims; the fate of the young Dauphin had long been shrouded in mystery and rumor. In 1795, the revolutionary government, which held him prisoner, had officially announced his death from scrofula at the age of ten, but the stories of witnesses who claimed to be present at the death varied widely. Some years later a shoemaker's wife, who had been charged with the care of the royal prisoner, swore on her deathbed that young Louis had been spirited away and that another boy had been buried in his grave...