Despite the prominence given by Shakespeare to the ‘healing of the king’ in All's Well That Ends Well, criticism of the episode has been both sketchy and unenlightening. Writers intent on demonstrating its failure point to the incredibility of the king's cure or to the inconsistency of the heroine's motives. Those arguing for its success speak of the simple sympathetic response that an appeal to romantic source materials would likely have evoked. Either way, preoccupation with questions of literary modes and standards, the critical legacy of W. W. Lawrence's influential pioneer interpretation, has obscured the extent to which the meaning turns not so much on subtleties of literary perception as on matters of contemporary medical interest.