On 13 April 1756, Ralph Cotgreave, an 18-year old labourer from Waverton, about six miles from the city, was admitted to Chester Infirmary with scrofula, a painful condition characterised by swellings in the neck and caused by a bacterial infection.  Also known as the King’s Evil, there was a superstition that the illness could only be cured by being touched by a member of the Royal Family. But since Ralph was unlikely to bump into King George, he needed medical treatment and it was provided at the hospital by Dr Hayes.  

To obtain treatment, a patient needed to be referred by someone in authority (someone from the class of men who were funding the hospital), and the teenager was recommended to the infirmary by Ralph Leycester, Esquire, a rich and powerful landowner who lived 25 miles away at Toft Hall, a rather grander abode that Cotgrave’s home in Waverton.

It is unclear how Ralph Cotgreave knew Ralph Leycester but whatever the connection, it secured him the treatment he needed, although it took a full five weeks and in the end, only relieved his symptoms rather than effecting a cure.  He was “made an outpatient” on 25 May.  With no antibiotics, serious infectious diseases were largely incurable and one of the main treatment options at the time was surgical – literally cutting out the swellings from the neck. But however well his condition seemed to be relieved, it was certainly not a cure for a serious illness. The teenager was dead before the end of the year and was buried at Waverton on 15 December.

Less than a year later, in December 1757, Ralph Cotgreave’s father, who was also called Ralph, was admitted to the Chester Infirmary at the age of 52, with pain in the stomach, from which he had been suffering for four months.  Like his son, his treatment was deemed to be effective – at least up to a point – and he was judged to have been “Reliev’d” when he was discharged. But like his son, Ralph Cotgreave senior’s health seems hardly to have been perfect. He died a year later and was buried in the same churchyard as Ralph junior, on 2 January 1759.

Sources
Waverton Parish Register
Cheshire Archives: HI/51
Cheshire Archives: P282/4554/32
Ormerod, G. (1818) The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, Volume 1.