Anne Conway
Anne Conway suffered from a severe, chronic headache that, the Dictionary of National Biography records, “never left her, night or day, till her death,” treated over the years by numerous physicians and remedies without lasting success. In January and February 1666, at the urging of her husband and household, Valentine Greatrakes traveled from Ireland to Ragley Castle in Warwickshire to attempt a cure by stroking, in the presence of witnesses including the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. The attempt failed. The Dictionary of National Biography records that Greatrakes “exerted his art upon her in vain.” Conway’s case is among the best documented of Greatrakes’s failures because of the number of prominent witnesses present and the subsequent correspondence and scholarship it generated.