Toad doctors
traditional medicine practitioners
Toad doctors were practitioners of a specific tradition of medicinal folk magic, operating in western England until the end of the 19th century. Their main concern was healing scrofula (then called "the King's Evil," a skin disease), though they were also believed to cure other ailments including those resulting from witchcraft. They cured the sick by placing a live toad, or the leg of one, in a muslin bag and hanging it around the sick person's neck.
“Toad doctors” enters the record as traditional medicine practitioners. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Toad, doctors and traditional can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17034540. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Toad doctors” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.