Royal Medicine, Is there a doctor in the house?

When European royals got sick, they had access to the best physicians money, status, and power could buy. The problem? For much of history, those physicians were working with flawed theories, brutal treatments, and a truly alarming amount of confidence. In this episode, we look at the documented medical cases of Charles II, Louis XIV, Catherine the Great, George III, Mary II, Henry VIII, and Ivan IV from bloodletting and blistering to risky surgery, smallpox, chronic wounds, and the limits of royal medicine. This is the story of what happened when crowns met illness… and the crown still lost.