One of the best known of these healers was Valentine Greaterick (or Greatrakes), who was born in Ireland in 1628, and who came to England (about 1665) by invitation of Lord Conway, upon a mission thus quaintly expressed: to cure "that excellent lady of his, the pains of whose _head_, as great and as unparalleled as they are, have not made her more known and admired at home and abroad, than have her other endowments." Lady Conway seems to have been intensely devoted to mystical pursuits, and assembled at Ragley Castle such men as Greatrakes, Rev. Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S., author of _Sadducismus Triumphatus_, Dr. Henry Moore, the Cambridge Platonist, and others of whom Mr. Lang speaks as "an unofficial but active society for psychical research, as that study existed in the seventeenth century." They told tales of "levitation" and witchcraft and the movements of bodies by unseen agencies, at all of which one or the other had been an eyewitness; and Greatrakes seems to have taken as prominent a part in these as in the healing proceedings. Greatrakes was called to his career by a special indication of providence--"he heard a voyce within him (audible to none else) encouraging to the tryals; and afterwards to correct his unbelief the voice aforesaid added this signe, _that his right hand should be dead, and that the stroaking of his left arme should recover it again_, the events whereof were fully verified by him three nights together by a successive infirmity and cure of his arme." While he failed to cure Lady Conway's headaches "he wrought a few miracles of healing among rural invalids," and seems to have been particularly successful with nervous complaints. "I saw him," writes a contemporary, "put his Finger into the Eares of a man who was very thick of Hearing, and immediately he heard me when I asked him very softly severall questions."