The medico-psychological interests of King James I

King James I of England (1566-1625) had unusually wide interests in new concepts about mental and physical diseases during the early seventeenth-century. He issued medical opinions about magic, witchcraft, the bubonic plague, hysteria, unconscious fits, sleepwalking, smoking, the "King's Evil", and many other medico-psychological symptoms and treatments which caught his imagination. In his didactic way, James's continuing studies of medical abnormalities of the body and mind revealed his great concern about the health of his people.