Dr. Johnson and Scrofula

I spent the day yesterday comparing the latin text of Pliny's Natural History and an English text to see what is being translated as 'scrofula'. In every case, scrofula came from a form of 'struma' however, doing another word search, I found there were 67 instances of 'struma' in the text but only 19 were translated as scrofula. Now that could also be because the English word search doesn't give you the adjective when you are searching for the noun, but I am too lazy to look for every one of the 67 occurrences of the word. You will have to forgive me.

There is an interesting entry in the Cambridge History of Human Diseases on scrofula but there is no electronic version, that I can access remotely, so any discussion of that text will have to wait until I can get to a university library and have a look.

For the time being then, I will leave the discussion of scrofula with a comment on the fact that Samuel Johnson, he who wrote the dictionary, had scrofula as a child. At the age of two, he was taken to see Queen Anne who was the last English monarch to attempt the healing touch. It was abandoned shortly after as being too Catholic a practice. Queen Anne did give him a gold coin which he wore around his neck until he died in his old age.

It is assumed that he got scrofula from drinking infected cows' milk since that is how people commonly got it. It is something that people who think that 'raw milk' is superior to pasteurized milk want to consider. The gold coin that Queen Anne gave to Dr. Johnson has been preserved and is on display at the British Museum and you can see it online here.