In the Middle Ages, we read that there were many instances of miraculous cures effected at the various shrines of the saints, and in the churches in which were exhibited the bones and other relics of the holy people of church history. As Dr. George R. Patton says: "A word scrawled upon parchment, for instance, would cure fevers; an hexameter from the Iliad of Homer cured gout, while rheumatism succumbed to a verse from Lamentations. These could be multiplied, and undoubtedly all were equally potent of cure in like manner.... At one time holy wells were to be found in almost every parish of Ireland, to which wearisome journeys were made for the miraculous powers of cure. It was the custom of the cured to hang upon the bushes contiguous to the springs small fragments of their clothing, or a cane, or a crutch as a memento of cure, so that from afar the springs could be easily located by the many colored fragments of clothing, rags, canes and crutches swayed upon the branches by the wind. Inasmuch as the bushes for many rods around were thus adorned, the cures must have been far from few." In the Middle Ages it was the custom of persons afflicted with scrofula and kindred disorders to come before the king upon certain days to receive the "Royal Touch," or laying-on-of-hands which was held to be an infallible specific for the disease. The custom was instituted by Edward the Confessor, and continued until the accession to power of the house of Brunswick. It is a matter of history that many persons were cured by the touch of the king's hands. Wiseman, a celebrated surgeon and physician of old London testifies as follows: "I myself have been an eye-witness of many thousands of cures performed by his majesty's touch alone, without any assistance of medicine or surgery, and those, many of them, such as had tired out the endeavors of able surgeons before they came hither.... I must needs profess that what I write will little more than show the weakness of our ability when compared with his majesty's, who cureth more in one year than all the surgeons of London have done in an age." The virtue of the "King's Touch" was finally brought in doubt by the wonderful successes of a man by the name of Valentine Greatrakes, who in the Seventeenth Century began "laying on hands" and made even more wonderful cures than those of the king. So marked was his success that the government had difficulty in suppressing the growing conviction among the common people that Greatrakes must be of royal blood, and the rightful heir to the throne, because of the great healing virtues of his hands, which, they argued, could be possessed only by those having royal blood in their veins. The Chirurgical Society of London investigated Greatrakes' cures, and rendered an opinion that he healed by virtue of "some mysterious sanative contagion in his body."