‘A virtue beyond all medicine’: The Hanged Man's Hand, Gallows Tradition and Healing in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century England
نویسندگان
چکیده
From the eighteenth century through to the abolition of public executions in England in 1868, the touch of a freshly hanged man's hand was sought after to cure a variety of swellings, wens in particular. While the healing properties of corpse hands in general were acknowledged and experimented with in early modern medicine, the gallows cure achieved prominence during the second half of the eighteenth century. What was it about the hanged man's hand (and it always was a male appendage) that gave it such potency? While frequently denounced as a disgusting 'superstition' in the press, this popular medical practice was inadvertently legitimised and institutionalised by the authorities through changes in execution procedure.
منابع مشابه
The trade in medicinal leeches in the southern Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century.
The practice of bloodletting or phlebotomy was a predominant feature of western medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the use of medicinal leeches as a mild form of letting blood achieved immense notoriety in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, especially in France. The almost insatiable demand for leeches drove a lucrative trade in these animals, the history of whi...
متن کاملA century of growth: a century of progress.
Chemistry in the service of medical practice was relegated to the periphery of medical science until well into the nineteenth century. Biochemistry took shape near the close of the nineteenth century, when emphasis on living systems shifted from physiology to chemistry. The subsequent emergence of clinical chemistry in the opening years of the twentieth century, as the medical application of an...
متن کاملCunning-folk in the medical market-place during the nineteenth century.
Over the last twenty years a considerable amount of valuable research has uncovered the activities of a variety of unorthodox medical practitioners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Quack doctors, spiritual healers, medical botanists, and bone-setters have all been subjected to detailed analysis.1 In contrast, the practitioners of folk-magical healing have been largely overlooked.2 Th...
متن کاملPractice makes perfect. Essay review.
It is rare to find two books published at around the same time and on a similar subject in the history of medicine and to be able to welcome them both with enthusiasm. But John Harley Warner's study of nineteenth-century American practitioners, and Irvine Loudon's account of medical practice in England between 1750-1850, merit such a response. Both deserve a wide readership among historians. Th...
متن کاملCambridge medical students at Leyden.
HIsToRUNs of medical education at Cambridge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Rolleston 1932; Winstanley 1935, 1958) have rightly drawn attention to the inadequacy of university provision for medical teaching. They have criticized, with some inconsistency, both the failure of the University to revise its outmoded statutory requirements and its failure to enforce them. Until the n...
متن کامل