or rubbing gently with the hand, a method which has been employed by some persons for curing diseases.

Mr Greatrakes or Greatrix, the famous Irish stroker, is said to have performed many wonderful cures. He gives the following account of his discovery of this art, and of the success with which he practised it:

"About 1662 I had an impulse (says he), or a strange persuasion in my own mind (of which I am not able to give any rational account to another), which did very frequently suggest to me, that there was bestowed on me the gift of curing the king's evil; which, for the extraordinaryness of it, I thought fit to conceal for some time; but at length I communicated this to my wife, and told her, that I did verily believe that God had given me the blessing of curing the king's evil; for whether I were in private or public, sleeping or waking, still I had the same impulse. But her reply to me was, that she conceived this was a strange imagination; yet, to prove the contrary, a few days after there was one William Mather of Alterbridge in the parish of Lismore, who brought his son William to my house, desiring my wife to cure him, who was a person ready to afford her charity to her neighbours, according to her small skill in chirurgery. On which my wife told me, there was one that had the king's evil very grievously in the eyes, cheek, and throat; whereupon I told her, that she should now see whether this were a bare fancy or imagination, as she thought it, or the dictates of God's Spirit on my heart. Then I laid my hands on the places affected, and prayed to God for Jesus' sake to heal him; and bid the patient two or three days afterwards to bring the child to me again, which accordingly he did; and I then saw the eye was almost quite whole; and the node, which was almost as big as a pullet's egg, was suppurated; and the throat strangely amended; and, to be brief (to God's glory I speak it) within a month discharged itself quite, and was perfectly healed, and so continues, God be praised."

Then there came to him one Margaret Maclean of Balinecly, in the parish of Lismore, who had been afflicted with the evil above seven years, in a much more violent degree; and soon after, his fame increasing, he cured the same disease in many other persons for three years. He did not meddle all this time with any other distemper; till about the end of these three years, the ague growing epidemical, he found, as formerly, that there was bestowed on him the gift of curing that disease. He cured Colonel Phaire, of Cahirmony in the county of Corke, of an ague, and afterwards many other persons of different distempers, by stroking; so that his name was wonderfully cried up, as if some divine person had been sent from above. January 1665-6, he came over to England, at the request of the earl of Orery; in order to cure the lady of the lord-vicount Conway, of Ragley in Warwickshire, who had for many years laboured under a most violent headache. He staid at Ragley three weeks or a month; and though he failed in his endeavours to relieve that lady, he cured vast numbers of people in those parts and at Worcester.

Though we are no friends to the marvellous, nor believe it possible that either the king's evil or ague can be cured by stroking or friction of any kind, whether gentle or severe, we have no hesitation to acknowledge that many cures might be performed by Mr Greatrakes. Every reflecting person who reads the foregoing account which he gives of himself will see that he was an enthusiast, and believed himself guided by a particular revelation; and such is the credulity of mankind, that his pretensions were readily admitted, and men crowded with eagerness to be relieved of their diseases. But it is well known to physicians, that in many cases the imagination has accomplished cures as wonderful as the force of medicine. It is owing chiefly to the influence of imagination that we have so many accounts from people of veracity of the wonderful effects of quack medicines. We are perfectly assured that these medicines, by their natural operation, can never produce the effects ascribed to them; for there is no kind of proportion between the medicine and the effect produced, and often no connection between the medicine and the disease.