A closer look
Long before universal healthcare, there was 'royal touch.' In medieval England and France, monarchs claimed they ruled by divine right, which supposedly gave them magical healing powers. If a peasant contracted scrofula, a gross tuberculosis infection of the neck lymph nodes heavily branded as 'the King's Evil,' the official medical treatment was to literally stand in line to be poked by the monarch. King Charles II touched nearly 100,000 gross necks during his reign. Unsurprisingly, tapping a festering wound with a royal finger didn't actually cure bacterial infections.
