I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I
shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are

1. The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula.

2. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder.

3. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley.

4. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.

The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are
accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances.

The third exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wisdom, immaculate
honesty, and vast general acquirements to make a good physician of a
great bishop.

The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct delusion, which
flourished only forty years ago; drawn in all its details, as being a
rich and comparatively recent illustration of the pretensions, the
arguments, the patronage, by means of which windy errors have long been,
and will long continue to be, swollen into transient consequence. All
display in superfluous abundance the boundless credulity and excitability
of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine.

"From the time of Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, the monarchs of
England were in the habit of touching those who were brought to them
suffering with the scrofula, for the cure of that distemper. William the
Third had good sense enough to discontinue the practice, but Anne resumed