Патшалардың емдік күші: «Патшаның тиісуі» дәстүрі

Healing power supposedly possessed by monarchs

The royal touch (also known as the king's touch) was a form of laying on of hands, whereby French and English monarchs touched their subjects, regardless of social classes, with the intent to cure them of various diseases and conditions. The thaumaturgic touch was most commonly applied to people suffering from tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis (better known as scrofula or the King's Evil), and exclusively to them from the 16th century onwards. Henry VII touched seven or eight infected people annually, and there were intervals of several years in which he did not perform the ritual at all. Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) touched 59 people between early January 1530 and late December 1532. The Protestant Edward VI (r. 1547–1553) apparently did not perform the ritual, but the Catholic Mary I (r. 1553–1558) took it somewhat more seriously. George I (r. 1714–1727) permanently abandoned the practice, but the exiled James II's Jacobite heirs claimed the ability until the 1780s. The demonologist Pierre de Lancre (1553–1631) boasted that even dead French monarchs could heal; it was, indeed, still believed in the 16th century that the healing power was retained by Saint Louis IX's arm, preserved in Poblet Monastery in Catalonia. After 1722, the sentence exclaimed by the king upon touching the infected changed to the more hopeful: "The King touches you, may God heal you." The new formula, rather than implying that God would inevitably grant the monarch's wish, was a prayer that may or may not result in a cure. Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) was skeptical about the royal touch. He performed it early in his reign, but caused a scandal when he failed to summon the scrofulous at Eastertide in 1739 and never again touched the diseased. The custom was thus suspended for 36 years, until Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) revived it at his coronation on 11 June 1775 by touching 2,400 people. That was probably the only time he touched the scrofulous. The earliest evidence of the royal touch in Navarre is from 1375, during the reign of Charles II, who had dynastic claims in France. There are eighteen recorded instances of royal touching by Charles II and Charles III between 1375 and 1413, but the record is very incomplete. These ceremonies took place in Pamplona, Olite, Tudela, Saint Jean Pied de Port and Bayonne. They were not large affairs, only between one and seven persons being touched on each occasion. Those seeking healing might travel long distances, in one case from Zaragoza in Aragon. The touched usually received alms from the king, between 5 and 52 sueldos in the early cases and between 20 and 100 sueldos in the later cases. There are several cases from between 1377 and 1394 of persons receiving alms "to cure them" as if they were touched when they were not. Inoculation, an early form of immunization, was introduced into England during the reign of George I, who had put a definite end to the royal touch in his kingdom. The royal family strongly supported it, but it was controversial medically as well as politically and theologically. The medicine historian Adrian Wilson described it as "the Whig and Hanoverian equivalent of the Stuart practice of touching for scrofula But whereas the Royal Touch mobilised divine powers, based on hereditary right, inoculation deployed natural powers harnessed by man, with the monarch as the benevolent onlooker rather than indispensable participant." Scholars have held different opinions about the royal touch, ranging from deprecation in the 19th and early 20th century to more sympathetic treatment. The Whig politician Lord Macaulay (1800–1859) ridiculed it as an "absurd superstition of a pre enlightened age". The University of London medicine professor Sir Raymund Crawfurd published a study in 1911, revealing his fascination with the "dubious if exotic" practice. The study Les Rois thaumaturges by the French historian Marc Bloch followed in 1924. Bloch was baffled by the tenacity of the esoteric practice and agreed with Lord Macaulay's assessment that it was grounded in a form of mass hysteria. Recently, however, historians have avoided attributing the popularity of the royal touch to naivety of the masses. The British historian Keith Thomas discussed the royal touch in the context of religion and magic, while his colleague and compatriot J. C. D. Clark attributes the survival of the practice into the 18th century to the persisting notion of the divine right of kings.

In The Return of the King, Aragorn provides additional proof that he is the rightful king of Gondor by demonstrating that he has the "hands of a healer", saving as many as he can after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.