which has interfered with the evolution of medicine from the dawn of
Christianity until now. When that troublesome declaimer, Carlstadt,
declared that "whoso falls sick shall use no physic, but commit his case
to God, praying that His will be done," Luther asked, "Do you eat when
you are hungry?" and the answer being in the affirmative, he continued,
"Even so you may use physic, which is God's gift just as meat and drink
is, or whatever else we use for the preservation of life." Hence it was,
doubtless, that the Protestant cities of Germany were more ready than
others to admit anatomical investigation by proper dissections.(317)

(317) For Luther's belief and his answer to Carlstadt, see his Table
Talk, especially in Hazlitt's edition, pp. 250-257; also his letters
passim. For recent "faith cures," see Dr. Buckley's articles on Faith
Healing and Kindred Phenomena, in The Century, 1886. For the greater
readiness of Protestant cities to facilitate dissections, see Toth,
Andreas Vesalius, p. 33.

Perhaps the best-known development of a theological view in the
Protestant Church was that mainly evolved in England out of a French
germ of theological thought--a belief in the efficacy of the royal touch
in sundry diseases, especially epilepsy and scrofula, the latter being
consequently known as the king's evil. This mode of cure began, so
far as history throws light upon it, with Edward the Confessor in the
eleventh century, and came down from reign to reign, passing from the
Catholic saint to Protestant debauchees upon the English throne, with
ever-increasing miraculous efficacy.

Testimony to the reality of these cures is overwhelming. As a simple
matter of fact, there are no miracles of healing in the history of the
human race more thoroughly attested than those wrought by the touch
of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and especially of that chosen
vessel, Charles II. Though Elizabeth could not bring herself fully to
believe in the reality of these cures, Dr. Tooker, the Queen's chaplain,
afterward Dean of Lichfield, testifies fully of his own knowledge to the
cures wrought by her, as also does William Clowes, the Queen's surgeon.
Fuller, in his Church History, gives an account of a Roman Catholic
who was thus cured by the Queen's touch and converted to Protestantism.
Similar testimony exists as to cures wrought by James I. Charles I also
enjoyed the same power, in spite of the public declaration against its
re