METHUSELAH ARCHIVE INTERVENTIONS / THE STROKING CURE

The Stroking Cure

regimen · 1662–1683
category:regimen
delivery:Greatrakes laid his bare hands on the affected part of a patient's body and stroked or rubbed it, usually repeatedly, sometimes invoking God's name or a short prayer ('God Almighty heal thee for his mercy's sake'). Contemporary observers Henry More and George Rust described the effect as driving the disease -- 'the morbific matter' -- along the body until it was forced into an extreme part (the fingers, toes, nose, or tongue), where the part would go cold and numb before sensation returned and the complaint supposedly vanished. No instrument or medicine changed hands, and Greatrakes charged no standard fee (the one documented exception, 155 pounds from Anne, Viscountess Conway, is recorded in this case's financial-conflict section); treatment was delivered directly by Greatrakes himself, first to individuals at his home at Affane, County Waterford, and during his 1666 English tour at Worcester and in London, where he stayed for several months in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
price tier:mass · 1662–1666
era:1662–1683
current status:historical
regulatory:unregulated
SHORT PITCH (AS SOLD)
An Irish Protestant gentleman announces that God has given his bare hands alone the power to cure disease by touch -- first the king's evil, then ague and other diseases -- and offers it to all comers for nothing.
THE ACTUAL EVIDENCE
No physiological mechanism for the stroking is documented as demonstrated in the sources reviewed for this case. Contemporary defenders and critics could not agree on an explanation even among themselves: Greatrakes framed the power as a divinely bestowed gift while declining to call the cures miracles, his ally Henry Stubbe's pamphlet -- titled to promise a 'physicall discourse' on the cures -- is recorded by the Dictionary of National Biography as 'attributing his success to miraculous agency,' and his critic David Lloyd published a pamphlet, titled to deny the cures were miracles, that (per the same Dictionary of National Biography) attacked Greatrakes's private character. A closely documented test of the claim was weeks of repeated stroking on Anne, Viscountess Conway's severe chronic headache, observed by prominent contemporaries; it failed. A separate formal demonstration before Charles II's own court in 1666 also failed to persuade.
PRACTITIONERS
CASES
CLAIMS
SOURCES
  1. Greatrakes, Valentine (1890)
  2. Greatrakes, Valentine [nicknamed the Stroker] (1629–1683), faith healer (2004)
  3. A Brief Account of Mr. Valentine Greatrak's, and Divers of the Strange Cures by Him Lately Performed (1666)
  4. The Miraculous Conformist, or, An Account of Severall Marvailous Cures Performed by the Stroaking of the Hands of Valentine Greatarick (1666)
  5. Greatrakes the Stroker: The Interpretations of Historians (1982)
  6. Greatrakes the Stroker: The Interpretations of His Contemporaries (1982)
  7. A Brief Account of Mr Valentine Greatraks (2019)
NOTES

Valentine Greatrakes’s “stroking cure” had no apparatus, medicine, or written system beyond his own hands. What began in 1662 as a claimed gift for curing scrofula, the king’s evil, expanded within a few years into the treatment of ague and other diseases. It was delivered for free to whoever presented themselves, first at his home in Ireland and then, during a few frantic months in 1666, to a great number of English patients in Worcester and London. Its authority rested entirely on Greatrakes’s own charisma and the testimonials of the eminent people who witnessed it, not on any licensed medical standing, instrument, or priced product.