Abstract
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.
Highlights
James White, aged 23, and Walter White, his brother, aged 21, were executed at Kennington Common, for breaking open and robbing the dwelling house of farmer Vincent of Crawley. They acknowledged the justice of their sentence, but laid their ruin to an accomplice, who, they declared, decoyed them from their labouring work, by telling them how money was to be got by thieving.—While the unhappy wretches were hanging, a child about nine months old was put into the hands of the executioner, who nine times, with one of the hands of each of the dead bodies, stroked the child over the face
The folklorist William Henderson related an account from County Durham, where a woman, who had been suffering from a wen for eleven years, was advised by ‘a very respectable man’ to rub a dead child’s hand nine times across the excrescence
Alderson asked if there were people currently waiting for it, and on being told there were two he informed the hangman that he could continue to perform the ‘unpleasant ceremony’.70. Brown put his foot down subsequently, for we find Botting complaining to the Court of Aldermen in November that once again he had been barred from ‘the privilege of rubbing persons afflicted with wens’
Summary
Across early-modern Europe the corpse was a significant element in the pharmacopeia of the medical profession and the populace. While calcinated vegetables and burnt sponge were amongst his preferred applications, once again the weight of testimony led him to conclude that ‘fear and awe’ could have a beneficial physiological effect on the condition, as applied when ‘rubbing a dead man’s hand, and the royal touch, which make a deep impression on children, from their solemnity’.25 This learned discourse and debate on the power of the dead hand was digested and regurgitated in a letter to the London Chronicle in 1759, published in response to a newspaper report of a stroking at a public execution the previous week. The folklorist William Henderson related an account from County Durham, where a woman, who had been suffering from a wen for eleven years, was advised by ‘a very respectable man’ to rub a dead child’s hand nine times across the excrescence.28 Another healing tradition that applied to charmers and charming more generally, and which was sometimes observed with the dead hand, was that the patient had to be a different gender to the healer). The seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey noted this contra-sexual requirement, relating the story of how a Somerset painter who had a wen the size of a pullet’s egg in his cheek was cured by rubbing it with a dead woman’s hand. a Shropshire folklorist noted that a woman suffering from the King’s Evil had to eat a piece of bread and butter from the hand of a killed man, and vice versa. It is worthy of note that there is no strong bias towards left or right hands in these traditions
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