The king’s evil (from the Latin morbus regius meaning royal sickness), more commonly known as scrofula or medically tuberculous lymphadenitis, was a skin disease believed to be cured by the touch of the monarch as part of their inherited divine powers. The idea that the royal touch, a simple laying of hands by the monarch on a sufferer, could cure the infection persisted for 1,200 years down through the 18th century. The cause of the infection was not known until the late 19th century. Historically, the illness was often referred to as consumption, phthisis, scrofula, the "king's touch", the "white plague", and the "captain of all these men of death". In 1839, Johann Lukas Schönlein, a German physician, coined the term "tuberculosis" as a generic term for all the manifestations of tuberculosis since the tubercle was the anatomical basis of the disease.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original content at https://www.worldhistory.org/King's_Evil/.