Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Richard Wiseman

  • Richard Wiseman, “father of English surgery”

    Richard Wiseman. Photo by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. Hunterian Museum, London. Via ArtUK. Richard Wiseman lived in the turbulent seventeenth century that devastated Western Europe by its internecine conflicts. Germany was torn apart by the Thirty Years War, France by the rebellion known as the Fronde, and England by the Civil War…

  • The King’s-Evil and sensory experience in Richard Wiseman’s Severall Chirurgicall Treatises

    Adam KomorowskiSang SongIreland Throughout many centuries, the monarchs of England maintained as royal prerogative the ability to heal the sick by virtue of their miraculous touch alone. William of Malmesbury (c.1090-c.1143) first described the use of the thaumaturgic touch by King Edward the Confessor (1003-66), who healed a woman afflicted with scrofula.1,2,3 While this power…