"The Devil Hath Laughed at The Physicians": Witchcraft and Medical Practice in Seventeenth - Century New England

The Devil Hath Laughed
at the Physicians: Witchcraft

and Medical Practice in
Seventeenth-Century New England
NORMAN GEVITZ
ESPITE what has become nearly a cottage industry

in the publication of books and articles on New
England witchcraft accusations and trials, little attention has been given to the role of male physicians
and surgeons in the events that transpired. Earlier
generations of historians making blanket generalizations fell into two camps. Either they believed, as did Fielding Garrison, that physicians played no significant role in what transpired in
Salem and elsewhere, or they argued, along with Charles Upham,
that these practitioners did play an important role but were simply
products of their age and that there were few discernible differences
between their attitudes and behaviors and that of other professionals
such as clergymen and lawyers.1
Modern historians, particularly in the last quarter of this century,
have apparently had little interest in either of these perspectives, as
reflected by the meager space in their works devoted to seventeenth. Fielding Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (Philadelphia: Saunders,
), p. ; Charles Upham, Salem Witchcraft: with an Account of Salem Village and a History
of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects [first published ] (Williamstown, Mass.:
Corner House, ), pp. ; see also Henry R. Viets, A Brief History of Medicine in
Massachusetts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), p. .
This paper was supported through a research grant (RH--) from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and through the W.B.H. Dowse Fellowship in Early
American Studies, Massachusetts Historical Society. I thank Jackie Wolf, Melanie Gevitz,
and Judith Edinger for their helpful suggestions.
oxford university press
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Journal of the History of Medicine
: Vol. , January
century medical practice in New England as it related to witchcraft

issues. To be sure, many of the scholarly studies of the past quarter
of a century on New England witchcraft have significantly enriched
our understanding of the social, economic, cultural, and political
factors that underlay witchcraft accusations and prosecutions. They
have looked at the effect of local tensions, interpersonal conflicts,
instability caused by war, governmental upheaval, and the changing
status of the clergy. They have considered child abuse, the legal
system, and the geographic proximity of those involved. The personal
characteristics of accusers and accused, notably the effects of gender,
age, race, and poverty, have been examined as well. But at the same
time recent historians have not given serious attention to or have
simply ignored the role of male health care practitioners in the contemporary understanding, identification, and disposition of witchcraft-associated cases.2
In a monograph, Sanford Fox examined the role of science
in the shaping of New England clerics, lawyers, and physicians
thoughts on witchcraft. Though he was exploring a narrow question,
he also wrote on the general role that medical practitioners played
in the controversies of the period. However, he named comparatively
few physicians and surgeons, and his work, though dutifully cited,
gave historians limited insight as to medicines influence on what
transpired.3 Indeed, with respect to medicine, historians have paid
the most attention to diagnosing ex post facto the source of the Salem
girls behavior. Were they each suffering from a conversion syndrome,
or could their delusions have been the result of collective ergot
poisoning or the ingestion of another toxin?4
. Among the most provocative books of the last twenty-five years are John Demos,
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of New England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ); Richard Godbeer, The Devils Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem
Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ); Carol
Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New York: Norton, ); Richard Weisman,
Witchcraft, Magic and Religion in th-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ); Peter Charles Hoffer, The Devils Disciples (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, ); and Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
. Sanford J. Fox, Science and Justice: The Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, ), pp. .
. The argument for hysteria as a modern diagnosis was most forcefully argued in Chadwick
Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (New York: G. Braziller, ). For the ergot thesis, see Linnda
Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice
It is argued here that the medical arts played a significant and

sometimes pivotal role in the witchcraft controversies of seventeenthcentury New England. Not only were physicians and surgeons the
principal professional arbiters for determining natural versus preternatural signs and symptoms of disease, they occupied key legislative,
judicial, and ministerial roles relating to witchcraft proceedings. Fortysix male physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries are named in court
transcripts or other contemporary source materials relating to New
England witchcraft. These practitioners served on coroners inquests,
performed autopsies, took testimony, issued writs, wrote letters, or
committed people to prison, in addition to diagnosing and treating
patients. Some practitioners are simply mentioned in passing.5 Others
Caporael, Ergotism: The Satan loosed in Salem? Science, , , ; Nicholas P.
Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, Ergotism and the Salem witch trials, Science, , , ;
Mary K. Matossian, Ergot and the Salem witchcraft affair, Am. Sci., , , .
. The following list of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries are individuals that regularly
treated patients. It includes both those who were remunerated and who were not paid for
their services. It does not include individuals, most notably Cotton Mather, who were
medically literate but did not practice in the community. This list is derived from a much
larger population of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century practitioners identified for
a broader examination of early New England medicine. Some of these individuals have not
been previously identified as health care practitioners.
Isaac Addington () Boston; Thomas Atwood (d. ) Hartford, Wethersfield;
Nicholas Augur (ca.) New Haven; John Barton (d. ) Salem, Marblehead; John
Bridgham () Ipswich; Gershom Bulkeley () Wethersfield; Benjamin
Bullivant (fl. ) Boston; John Buss () Wells, Concord; Samuel Checkley
() Boston; John Clark II (d. ) Boston; Robert Couch (fl. ) Boston,
New Hampshire; Anthony Crosby () Rowley; Benjamin Davis ()
Boston; Mr. Day, Cambridge [see below]; John Dole () Newbury; Joseph Eliot
() Guilford; John Emerson (ca. ) Gloucester; John Emerson Jr. (
) Manchester; Zerobabel Endecott () Salem; Renald Fernald (d. ) Portsmith; Dr. Fuller (fl. ) Essex County [see below]; Bartholemew Gedney (
) Salem; Thomas Graves () Charlestown; Henry Greenland (ca.)
Newbury, Portsmith; William Griggs (ca.ca.) Gloucester, Salem Village; Nathaniel Hall (fl. ) Yarmouth, Boston, Hingham; Thomas Hastings () Hatfield; George Jackson (ca. ca. ) Permaquid, Marblehead; Thomas Maule (
) Salem; Thomas Oakes () Boston; Thomas Pell () Fairfield;
Jonathan Prescott Sr. (d. ) Concord; Francis Raynes (fl. ) York; Phillip
Reade (ca. ) Concord; Anthony Randall [the French doctor] (fl. ) Salem;
Bryan Rosseter (d. ) Windsor, Guilford; Jeremiah Swain () Reading; Peter
Thacher () Barnstable, Milton; Thomas Thacher () Weymouth, Boston; Roger Toothacre (ca. ) Billerica; Edward Weld () Salem; Michael
Wigglesworth () Malden; John Winthrop () Boston; John Winthrop
Jr. () Hartford; Wait Winthrop () Boston; Timothy Woodbridge (ca.
) Hartford. The context of the case in which Mr. Day the surgeon is mentioned
suggests the location to be Cambridge in Massachusetts rather than England. However, I
have yet to positively identify this practitioner, nor have I been able identify the particular
Dr. Fuller.
Journal of the History of Medicine
: Vol. , January
who are not named or could not be readily identified include the
physicians and surgeons in the Boston area in who could not
attribute the unusual effects of healer Margaret Joness inoffensive
drugs to natural causes, and the five or six Boston-area physicians
who found accused witch Goodwife Glover compos mentis in .6
Furthermore, the two great outbreaks of witchcraft accusations in
New England (i.e., Hartford in , and in Salem Village years
later) were dramatically furthered by the diagnoses of physicians.7
And finally, two of the seven Salem witchcraft judges were Wait
Winthrop, one of the most prominent physicians then in New England, and Bartholemew Gedney, an apothecary of Salem.8 Thus,
Garrisons claim that physicians had no appreciable role in what
occurred is contradicted by primary source materials.
As to the second traditionally accepted argument that physicians
attitudes and behaviors were not significantly different from other
professionals such as clergymen and lawyers, it is certainly true that
physicians as a group also believed in the possibility of preternatural
causes of disease. But unlike other professionals, physicians relied on
their specialized medical training and experience to make a differential
diagnosis and arrive at conclusions as to what ailed their patients.
Leading Renaissance and early modern physicians and surgeons,
such as Jean Fernel, Ambrose Pare, Girolamo Cardano, Andreas
Laurentius, Jan Baptista van Helmont, and Daniel Sennert, had considered and accepted the role of the devil in particular types of
illnesses in their general medical treatises, although the emphasis and
. The case against Margaret Jones is reported in Richard S. Dunn, James Savage and
Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, ), pp. . For Goodwife Glover, see Cotton Mathers Memorial Providences
Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions [originally published in ] in George Lincoln Burr,
ed., Narrative of the Witchcraft Cases (New York: Barnes and Noble, ), pp. .
. For the panic in Hartford, including the diagnosis of Dr. Rosseter, see the set of
documents compiled in David D. Hall, ed., Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New
England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, ), pp. . For the medical diagnosis
in Salem Village, see John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft [originally
published in ] (Bainbridge, N.Y.: York Mail-Print Inc., ), p. .
. For Wait Winthrop, see Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty
of New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), particularly
pp. . For Bartholemew Gedney, see Henry Waters, comp., The Gedney and Clarke
Families (n.p., ), pp. . For Gedneys activities as an apothecary, see Essex County
Court Transcripts -- ( October ) and -- ( March ), at the Essex
Institute, Salem, Massachusetts. Gedney at his death left drugs and instruments valued at
L. See George Francis Dow, Everyday Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (New York:
Dover Books, ), p. .
preponderance of their works rested on naturalistic explanations for

disease.9 Other medical writers, however, explored the role of the
devil and witchcraft in greater depth. On the Continent, these included Johan Weyer (), Andrea Cesalpino (), and Giovanni
Baptista Codronchi (). Weyer alone raised fundamental questions
about the efficacy or reality of supposed witchcraft to engender any
disease and considered as mentally ill many who thought themselves
to be witches.10
Several English medical writers also penned treatises on witchcraft,
including Edward Jorden (), John Cotta (), William Drage
(), and John Webster (), while other seventeenth-century
English physicians took prominent positions in the witchcraft debates.11 In their discussions and analyses of specific cases where witchcraft was suspected, and in bringing to bear medical theory and
practice as well as their own experience, these writers illuminated
for their medical colleagues the nature of certain odd and puzzling
symptoms in patients. They also influenced both clerical and legal
writers of the period, who, with the weight of medical opinion, were
far less willing to ascribe certain types of diseases such as impotency
to witchcraft than were medieval authors. No medical writer of the
early modern period, including those who wrote specifically on
and believed in the phenomenon of witchcraft, argued that witchengendered illnesses were many or ubiquitous. And all medical writers
believed that the responsibility of determining the origins of the
puzzling symptoms that led to suspicions of witchcraft or other diabolical action should rest specifically with physicians.12 As surviving
. See Leland L. Estes, The role of medicine and medical theories in the rise and fall
of the witch hunts in England, (Ph.D. diss., Chicago: University of Chicago, ), pp.
.
. See George Mora, Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyers De
Praestigiis Daemonum (Binghampton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, );
Mark Edward Clark and Kirk M. Summers, Hippocratic medicine and Aristotelian science
in the Daemonum Investigatio Peipatetica of Andrea Cesalpino, Bull. Hist. Med., ,
, . Giovanni Baptista Codronchis De Morbis Veneficis Ac Veneficiis () is discussed
by Estes, (n.), pp. .
. Edward Jorden, A Brief Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London:
John Windet, ); John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-Craft [originally published in ]
(New York: Da Capo Press, ); William Drage, Daimonomageia: A Small Treatise of
Sicknesses and Diseases from Witchcraft and Supernatural Causes (London: J. Dover, ); John
Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London: J.M., ). See also Garfield
Tourney, The physician and witchcraft in Restoration England, Med. Hist., , ,
.
. Estes, (n. ), pp. .
Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

primary sources amply demonstrate, New England practitioners
agreed with their European counterparts in respect to their diagnostic
role and function.
In Puritan New England, all afflictions were seen ultimately as the
result of supernatural forces. It was Gods will that humans should
suffer for their sins. Thus, when ill, the sick were expected to think
about their moral lapses or inadequacies, bear their afflictions with
grace, learn the lessons that God was teaching them, and, if they
recovered, walk a straighter path. Ministers and health care practitioners ideally played complementary roles. The clergy would help
the patient by using spiritual means to combat the diseases of the
soul, while health care practitioners, calling on Gods grace to bless
their efforts, would employ material agents to treat physical complaints. Some ministers also served as physicians, which Cotton
Mather would celebrate as the Angelical Conjunction, but the
extent to which their roles were fused was in fact far less than what
historians later assumed.13
If patients were taught to look inward for the cause of their afflictions and those of their loved ones, sometimes they could not identify
a spiritual fault of their own that would result in Gods displeasure.
If there was not an internal explanation, an external cause might
be the answer. One external cause sanctioned by scripture and thought
reasonable by common folk and intellectual elite alike was witchcraft.
Beginning in the s the colonies of Plymouth, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Haven, and New Hampshire all
enacted laws making witchcraft a capital offense.14
As commonly understood, witchcraft was an act by which individuals used secret or occult means, emanating from the devil, to inflict
suffering upon people or their property. To the great majority of
theologians and lawyers, an admission of an explicit pact with the
devil was necessary to prove one a witch; to laypersons, it was the
evil deed itself, thought to come from threatening individuals who
. See Patricia Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New
England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ), p. . Cotton Mather, The Angel of
Bethesda (Barre, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, ); Margaret Humphreys Warner,
Vindicating the ministers medical role: Cotton Mathers concept of the Nishmath-Chajim
and the spiritualization of medicine J. Hist. Med., , , .
. These laws are found in Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, pp. .
were reputed to have special powers, and who could appear to the
afflicted in spectral form.15
Physician writers were skeptical of the idea that evil persons had
any specific knowledge or powers of their own to cause people harm
other than through natural means such as poisons. Those physicians
who believed in witchcraft agreed with clerics and lawyers who
argued that though witches might think they directly harm others,
it is the devil, with whom they have compacted, that does the mischief.16 The actual process wherein the devil can cause physiological
harm was seen as problematical and rested on the putative powers
attributed to this incorporeal and spiritual entity. Where Galenicoriented physicians spoke of the devil stirring up and exciting the
humors, practitioners imbued with the corpuscular and iatromechanical perspectives of the last half of the seventeenth century spoke of
the devil insinuating himself into the constitution of the animal
spirits, heterogeneous atoms of little bodies.17
Medicine in New England was practiced by individuals who had
a range of qualifications. Though some physicians, surgeons, and
apothecaries had received their training in England or on the Continent, the majority, as the century progressed, were not educated
abroad but studied with established New England practitioners. Some
attended and graduated from Harvard College, which was established
in . Though the college had no formal medical curriculum, the
emphasis on Latin and Greek along with training in formal logic
. For the distinction between professional and lay definitions of witchcraft, see Keith
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, ), particularly pp.
; Godbeer, (n. ) The Devils Dominion, pp. .
. For the clerical literature, see William Perkins, A Discourse on the Damned Art of
Witchcraft (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, ); Meric Causabon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (London: Roger Daniel, ); and John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience
Touching Witches and Witchcrafts (London: W. Wilson, ). For the legal literature, see
Robert Filmer, An Advertisement to the Jury-Men of England [originally published ]
(Exeter: The Rota, ); Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (London: Felix
Kyngston, ); and Matthew Hale, A Short Treatise Touching Sherrifs Accompts . . . To
Which is Added a Tryal of Witches (London: William Shrowsbery, ). Other important
works of this period include Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark (London: Robert Ibbitson,
); and Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning
Witches and Apparitions (London: J. Collins, ). The single most profound early English
work on witchcraft was Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft [originally published in ]
(London: R.C., ).
. Thomas Willis, A medical philosophical discourse of fermentation, in The Remaining
Works of . . . Dr. Thomas Willis (London: T. Dring, ), pp. .

allowed students to master learned European texts that had not been
translated into the vernacular. Medically oriented graduates, after
finishing their baccalaureate, would then apprentice themselves and
later return, sometimes to defend a medical thesis for their masters
degree. But a Harvard diploma was not widely viewed as necessary
to be a successful practitioner, particularly in surgery, and collegetrained physicians, though often more socially prominent, were a
minority in the ranks of medicine. Most individuals bypassed collegiate work completely and went straight into an apprenticeship, while
other practitioners were largely self-taught.18
In addition to male physicians and surgeons, several women practitioners gained prominence in New England, but these doctresses
were barred from formal training. To some of their neighbors, the
status of these healers, particularly when they charged for their services, conflicted with attitudes about womens appropriate place in
society. Thus their activities became morally problematical. Some
of these women even found themselves the targets of witchcraft
accusations. This relationship has been examined by Carol Karlsen.19
The practice of medicine was largely unregulated. Some New
England colonies passed laws governing physic, surgery, and midwifery, but these were largely expressions of what were desirable
behaviors. Occasionally, however, persons were specifically barred
from practice, though more for moral transgressions than for charges
of incompetence. County and colony courts licensed some physicians
and surgeons, but licensure in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries was not requisite for practice; it was used most often by
practitioners to collect fees without having to demonstrate a legal
contract between parties. The real overseer of practitioners activities
was the community. The success of any physician or surgeon was
. The literature on colonial New England medical education and practice focuses more
on the eighteenth century than the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, see Philip Cash,
Eric Christianson, and J. Worth Estes, eds., Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts,
(Boston: University of Virginia Press, ); Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Medicine in the New
World: New Spain, New France and New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
), Watson, (n. ) The Angelical Conjunction; Norman Gevitz, Samuel Fuller of Plymouth Plantation: A Skillful Physician or Quacksalver, J. Hist. Med., , , ;
Malcolm Sydney Beinfeld, The Early New England doctor: An adaptation to a provincial
environment, Yale J. Biol. Med., , , , .
. See Karlsen, (n. ) The Devil, pp. .
based on public acceptance and satisfaction. No one could practice

as a physician or surgeon for very long unless they met local standards.
Often, since medicine was not a full-time occupation, this important
role would be entrusted to individuals who, through family or their
own accomplishments in other endeavors, would secure the support
and patronage of their neighbors.20
When New Englanders fell ill, they usually attempted to manage
the condition domestically first, sometimes asking the advice of relatives or other laypersons. But if the use of simple means was unsuccessful or if the patient exhibited or complained of uncommon or unusual
symptoms that confused or alarmed family members and others,
professional practitioners were often called in for help.21
Several witnesses or complainants in the New England witchcraft
trials noted in their depositions that they saw a particular doctor or
several doctors who tried to diagnose, interpret, and treat baffling
problems. Dr. Thomas Atwood was summoned to one man who felt
a great box on his ears and whose nose fell a bleeding in an
extraordinary manner.22 Dr. Philip Reade was sent for several times
for Sarah Townsend and her sister Elizabeth Carter in their great
fits;23 the mother and sister of one-year-old Mary Godfrey tried to
gather her urine to take to minister-physician John Buss.24 Dr. Thomas
Oakes was called to examine the Goodwin children suffering from
strange fits.25 James Carr, when he was taken after a strange manner
as if [every] living creature did run about every part of my body
ready to tear me to pieces, finally consulted Dr. Anthony Crosby.26
. In May , the General Court of Massachusetts decreed that no person or persons
whatsoever that are employed about the bodies of men, women, or children, for preservation
of life or health, (as physicians, chirurgeons, midwives, or others) presume to exercise or
put forth any act contrary to the known rules of art, nor exercise any force, violence, or
cruelty upon or towards the bodies of any, whether young or old (no, not in the most
difficult and desperate cases) without the advice and consent of such as are skilful in the
same art, if such may be had . . . Records of Massachusetts Bay, (Boston: William
White, ), vol. , .
. Some of the domestic remedies of colonists were collected by John Josselyn in his
New Englands Rarities Discovered [originally published in ] reprinted in Trans. Collect.
Am. Antiq. Soc., , , .
. Hall, (n. ) Witchcraft Hunting, pp. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. .
. Mather, (n. ) Memorial Providences, p. .
. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers (New York:
Da Capo Press, ), vol. , .

This same Dr. Crosby and a Dr. Fuller were called in on the case of
Elizabeth Brown who, according to her husband, felt as if birds were
pricking her legs or pricking her with the motion of their wings
and then it would rise up into her stomach with pricking pain as
nails and pins which she did bitterly complain and cry out like a
woman in travail.27 When Benjamin Abbott was taken with a great
swelling in his foot and a pain in his side for which he was exceedingly
tormented he applied to Dr. Jonathan Prescott.28 Other deponents
described how they had sought the aid of one or more unnamed
practitioners for their various and often odd symptoms. Elizabeth
Symonds told the court At several times I have been at the Doctors.29
Illnesses brought to the attention of health care practitioners could
be regarded as suspicious with respect to witchcraft in four principal
and often related respects. The first was the suddenness of the onset of
the problem. New England court records are replete with individuals
claiming that they or their loved ones were perfectly well one minute
and overcome with torturing pain and disability the next. Parents
testified that they were cuddling their happy, playful, thriving infant
when their child was struck by fits or spasms, vomiting, diarrhea,
bleeding, unconsciousness, or worse, sudden death.30 While the sudden deaths of adults might be explained away spiritually as Gods
inscrutable will, the punishment for ones sins, or naturally by an
underlying medical problem, the rapid demise of apparently healthy
infants, not subject to the infirmities of age and themselves far less
morally blameworthy, were usually more difficult for laypersons to
resolve and accept.
The second element was the strangeness of the symptoms. An
obvious example would be the young women of Salem Village who
barked like dogs, contorted their body parts in unusual positions, and
claimed they had visual and auditory experiences that no one else
could see or hear.31 While certain behaviors, such as during epileptic
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , pp. .
. Eyewitness John Hale reported, These children were bitten and pinched by invisible
agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way and returned back again,
so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic
fits or natural disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped,
seizures, might well be considered strange by onlookers, the so-called

fit was reasonably predictable in the elements that made up the
seizure: the sequence of events during the episode, the duration of
the attack, and its frequency. Therefore, the condition would not be
considered other than a natural disease, per se. Conversely, the more
idiosyncratic the symptoms, and the less regular its course, the greater
the wonderment of others.
The third element was the rarity of the complaint. Epileptic seizures
in early New England are well documented in diaries and court cases.
Furthermore, many children suffered from unspecified nonepileptic
seizures such as febrile convulsions. The ubiquitousness of these maladies, however horrific, weighed against preternatural conclusions. On
the other end of the spectrum, a seemingly singular condition, which
few had seen before, could readily become suspicious because no
one could point to one or more other cases with which it might be
compared; this was particularly true when no natural explanation
could be produced. A hydatidform mole, a child born without an
anus, and urine turning blue, were all unusual occurrences in sparsely
populated seventeenth-century New England. When such events
became public knowledge, these happenings, sometimes referred to as
prodigies, became topics of conversation throughout the colonies.32
Thus, sudden, strange, and rare illnesses presented health care practitioners with difficult diagnostic challenges.
A fourth element especially complicated the physicians task. Patients or their relatives often came to doctors convinced, or at least
sensing, that they were bewitched. Laypersons often argued that
unusual symptoms began right after an argument or physical contact
with a suspicious person. In their minds there was a causal relationship
between these two sequential events. Indeed, some laypersons apparently sought out health care practitioners only for a professional
confirmation of their own diagnosis.
Lay diagnosis differed significantly from medical evaluation in that
common people relied largely on an oral folk tradition rather than
learned treatises. A central lay diagnostic tool was the urine of the
their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented. Hale, (n. ) A Modest Enquiry,
p. .
. See David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early
New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), pp. .

sufferer. In some instances it was placed in bottles along with pins
and the victims hair. Sometimes the urine was thrown in the fire.
According to folk belief, a bewitched person was in constant invisible
spiritual linkage with the bewitcher, so that any part of the sufferers
body, manipulated in certain ways, could be employed to hurt the
guilty and relieve the condition of the victim. Thus, by burning
urine, witches might be burnt. In putting urine in a bottle with pins,
witches might feel pricking pains about their bodies. Through these
methods and other forms of counter-magic, laypersons hoped to
diagnose the source of the illness as witchcraft, identify the perpetrator,
cause that guilty person pain, and offer the bewitched relief.33 For
the most part, orthodox medical practitioners appear to have regarded
these practices as superstitious, but still had to deal with a patient or
loved ones who were convinced of their efficacy.
Unfortunately for orthodox health care practitioners, there were
no diagnostic tools that they could lawfully employ that had the same
reputed power to detect witchcraft that lay methods possessed. Their
tools were their senses, principally their ears and their eyes, and their
points of reference were their books and experience. John Cotta
argued that there were only two ways to distinguish natural from
diabolically caused disease in living sufferers. The first was the presence
of an extraordinary, wholly unexpected, or contrary symptom that
did not fit in with the other symptoms the patient was experiencing.
One example might be great strength, not only beyond what was
normal, but totally contrary to the nature of the patients debilitating,
languishing illness. The second way was to note the reaction to drugs
that had predictable physiological effects on the body. If the drugs
did not produce the usual results, such as vomiting, urinating, sweating, and defecating, but did produce wholly unexpected effects, such
as vomiting up pins and needles, witchcraft was considered a likely
cause. This was particularly true if deception was not suspected.34
While lawful medical means of detecting witchcraft might be convincing to some practitioners in making a differential diagnosis of
witchcraft, other and more skeptical health care providers likely knew
from their experience, as well as reason, that unusual symptoms might
. Godbeer, (n. ) The Devils Dominion, pp. , Demos, (n. ) Entertaining Satan,
pp. .
. Cotta, (n. ) The Triall of Witch-Craft, pp. .
accompany typical symptoms in any disease and that drugs do not

always work in expected and predictable ways.
Physicians and surgeons also inspected the bodies of dead individuals for foul play. In , Dr. Bray Rosseter of Guilford, Connecticut,
made a post-mortem examination of Elizabeth Kelly of Hartford,
an eight-year-old girl who experienced several unusual symptoms
following an argument with Goodwife Ayres. Young Elizabeth accused Ayres of pricking her, breaking her bowels, making her black
and blue, and causing her to choke. Rosseters autopsy was apparently
conducted five days after her death. He observed six aspects of her
body that he considered preternatural including a contracted esophagus like a hard fish bone that hardly a large pea could be forced
through. That Rosseter attributed this physical anomaly, as well as
five others which were likely due to the natural decomposition of
the body, to preternatural causes, was probably indicative of his own
limited experience performing autopsies, the absence of this unusual
esophageal pathology in the available literature, and the powerful
impact of sufferers witchcraft accusations on the thinking of laypersons and physicians alike. Rosseters preternatural determination
served to fan the flames of witchcraft suspicions in Hartford.35
In suspicious illnesses, diabolism competed with four other possibilities in medical practitioners differential diagnosis. The other four
potential judgments open to them can be labeled and classified, with
some caveats, as dissembling, distraction, disease, and doubt.
Seventeenth-century practitioners knew that some of their patients
faked or exaggerated their symptoms. The motives for such behavior
were believed to be to avoid work and responsibilities, to draw attention to themselves, and to gain the sympathy of others. Certainly,
the charge of dissembling was leveled against the afflicted young girls
and women of Salem Village. Witnesses at the various grand jury
hearings reported that the girls admitted they were deceiving the
court. Daniel Elliot, testifying on behalf of accused witch Elizabeth
Proctor, said he overheard one of her accusers say, that she did it
for sport. They must have some sport.36 And those who were accused
charged that the girls were both faking their symptoms and purpose. For Rosseters complete autopsy findings and documents relating to this case, see
Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, pp. .
. Boyer and Nissenbaum, (n. ) The Salem Witchcraft Papers, vol. , .

fully making wrongful claims. John Alden, after his escape from
prison, spoke of those wenches being present who played their
juggling tricks, falling down, crying out, and staring in peoples
faces.37 Accused witch Martha Carrier, who at her examination was
asked by one of the judges in the presence of her accusers, Can you
look upon these and not knock them down? responded, They will
dissemble if I look upon them.38 Dorcas Hoar, in her defense against
witchcraft charges, shouted out to her alleged victims, Oh! You are
liars and God will stop the mouth of liars.39 Even Mary Warren,
one of the original accusers, who had second thoughts and then
found herself on trial, reputedly told Elizabeth Hubbard that the
afflicted persons did dissemble.40 Despite such testimony, the vivid
demonstrations of fitful agony by the Salem Village girls convinced
most observers that whatever the cause of their distempers, their
illnesses were quite real. Physicians were thus faced with a difficult
dilemma when presented with such cases. Even if they suspected
dissembling on the part of the sufferer, short of a confession from
the patient, the practitioner feared being on shaky ground if he simply
dismissed such stories as untruths.
If the suffering of the afflicted was not faked, might it be mental
in nature? Distraction was defined as a state of disordered reasoning,
delusional behavior, and melancholy.41 John Cotta, as well as other
medical writers, argued that mental disturbances lowered resistance
to and provided greater opportunity for diabolical intervention. A
physician, therefore, had to consider whether witchcraft was the cause
or contributor to the distraction, or conversely, whether the mental
aberration was principally the source of the accusation.42 In Salem,
one major question for onlookers was whether the spectral images
that the young women saw and their tales of invisibly administered
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. For contemporary understandings of mental disease, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical
Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, ); Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [originally published
in ] (London: Thomas Tegg, ). See also Stanley Jackson, Robert Burton and
psychological healing, J. Hist. Med., , , ; Larry D. Eldridge, Crazy brained:
Mental illness in Colonial America, Bull. Hist. Med., , , .
. Cotta, (n. ) The Triall, pp. .
torture were but products of deranged imagination. On trial for her

life, Martha Corey was asked by one of the judges, Do not you see
how these afflicted girls do charge you? Corey answered, We must
not believe distracted persons.43 Martha Carrier similarly told the
court, It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that
are out of their wits.44 Accused witch Mary Soames tried to make
sense of the spectral visions of the Salem girls, noting that I have
been . . . myself distracted many a time and my [senses] have gone
from me and I thought I have seen many a body hurt me, and might
have accused many as well as she doth.45
One of the judges, however, in response to Martha Corey, raised
a significant point against her argument that her accusers were mentally ill. You charge these children with distraction. It is a note of
distraction when people vary in a minute, but these fix upon you,
this is not the manner of distraction.46 Indeed, the judge had correctly
identified a central problem with distraction as a diagnosis. The
documentary record shows New England medical practitioners diagnosing as distracted those individuals whose mental functioning was
chronically impaired and whose thoughts were scattered, illogical,
and unfocused on a continuing basis. The Salem Village girls, on the
other hand, were often lucid. Even when they lapsed into their fits,
they could shortly thereafter be direct in their testimony, definite in
what they said transpired, and focused in their accusations. In addition,
unlike distraction, in which the suffering individual made no sense
to others, these girls accounts of their experience with witchcraft,
including spectral visions, were not only well within the cultural
boundaries of what was considered reality, but other sufferers predicted and corroborated each girls experience.47
A third possibility was disease. According to medical writers on
witchcraft, the physician needed to consider the gamut of known
physical diseases as the basis of a patients suffering. They argued that
if a natural disease could explain a patients symptoms, one should
. Boyer and Nissenbaum, (n. ) Salem Witchcraft Papers, vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Deodat Lawson, A Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to
Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village . . . [originally published in ] in
Burr, (n. ) Narratives, pp. .

prefer this explanation to a preternatural one.48 Not surprisingly,
physicians had trouble explaining spectral visions as part of a natural
disease process. John Phillips of Boston told the Reverend John Hale
of a time when he had a sore, swollen leg. Lying in a warm bed with
his eyes opened he thought he saw women in silk clothing come to
his bedside, and so spoke to them, much to the surprise of a person
who was in the room. Phillips suspected conjuring tricks and after
sending for a physician he remained haunted by these women.
The physician, who could not come immediately, nevertheless sent
word, that the vapors ascending from his sore leg had caused a water
in his eyes, and disturbance in his brains, by means whereof he was
troubled with such visions; and sending an eye water to wash his eyes
with, and a cordial to take inwardly; upon the use of these, this
disturbance vanished in half a quarter of an hour.49
Other cases did not end so well. Elizabeth Knapp of Groton fell
into strange fits, saw a spectral representation of a local woman, and
claimed the devil himself had appeared before her and tried to get
her to sign a covenant. A physician was called
who judged a main part of her distemper to be natural, arising from the
foulness of her stomach and corruptness of her blood, occasioning fumes
in her brain and strange fantasies; whereupon (in order to further trial and
administration) she was removed home, and the succeeding week she took
physic, and was not in such violence handled in her fits as before; but
enjoyed an intermission, and gave some hopes of recovery.50
Three weeks later, however, her fits returned with such force that
six persons could hardly hold her. She leaped and skipped about
roaring, yelling, fetching deadly sighs so that the physician being
then again with her, consented that the distemper was diabolical,
refused to administer further; [and] advised to extraordinary fasting.51
That the doctor consented suggests that he was under considerable
pressure by the girls well-wishers for a diagnosis of diabolism. The
Reverend Increase Mather, in his An Essay For the Recording of Illustrious
Providences () had observed that sometimes the Devil hath
. Estes, (n. ), p. .
. Hale, (n. ) A Modest Enquiry, pp. .
. Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, pp. .
. Ibid.
laughed at the physicians, who have thought by medicinal applications

to dispossess him.52
As these two cases illustrate, early New England physicians could
attribute mental changes, particularly as they related to spectral representations, to disturbances originating in distant parts of the body.
One such disease in women was hysteria. As classically defined,
hysteria was due to the movement of the womb through the abdominal cavity, which interfered with or caused imbalances of the humors,
producing various strange behaviors.53 In the early seventeenth century, Dr. Edward Jorden wrote the first English treatise on the disease,
stemming from a suspected witchcraft case. Despite Jordens argument
that the young girl in question was suffering from hysteria, an old
woman who had been accused was found guilty of the crime. Jorden
also extended the classical definition of hysteria, maintaining that a
dysfunction of any bodily organ, not just the uterus, could cause the
symptoms which, he argued, were manifested principally in the
brain.54 Subsequent and more well-known authors, particularly Robert Burton and William Harvey, also presented insightful overviews
of the disorder. Later in the century, the neuroanatomist Thomas
Willis theorized that the origin of hysteria was no other organ than
the brain, and Thomas Sydenham argued further that hysteria was
an affliction of the mind.55
From the standpoint of the seventeenth-century practitioner, the
problem with hysteria as a diagnosis for the Salem Village girls was
threefold. First, discussions of hysteria in the contemporary literature
largely focused on isolated individual cases, and not what later would
be called mass hysteria. The disease was simply not viewed as
infectious like colds and smallpox. Thus, several individuals manifest. Increase Mather, An Essay For The Recording of Illustrious Providences [originally published in ] (New York: Garland, ), p. .
. See Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ), pp. .
. Jorden, ( n. ) A Brief Discourse. For other original materials relating to this case and
counter-arguments, see Michael MacDonald, ed., Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan
London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London: Routledge, ).
. Burton, (n. ) The Anatomy of Melancholy, pp. ; William Harvey, On parturition, in The Works of William Harvey (London: Sydenham Society, ) pp. ;
Thomas Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock . . . (London: T.
Dring, ), pp. ; Thomas Sydenham, The Works of Thomas Sydenham (London:
Sydenham Society, ), vol. , ; Veith, (n. ) Hysteria, pp. .

ing the same or similar hysterical symptoms was considered a remarkable occurrence. Second, though there was a similarity between the
problems of the Salem Village girls and a number of hysteria symptoms
as described by learned authors under the heading of hysteria, it
would have been difficult for practitioners to establish an exact match.
Many of the printed descriptions of the symptoms of hysteria differed
and were often vague and ambiguous. Last, many physicians treated
what they considered hysterical patients who made no accusations
of witchcraft.
Commenting on the afflictions of the Boston girl Margaret Rule
in , the Reverend Cotton Mather, though not a physician, noted
the inherent problems of attributing very odd symptoms to specific
diseases. I think I may, without vanity, pretend to have read not a
few of the best systems of physick that have been yet seen in these
American regions, Mather noted, but I must confess that I have
never yet learned the name of the natural distemper, whereto these
odd symptoms do belong.56 Many contemporary medical practitioners agreed.
Finally, there was a diagnosis of doubt, or no diagnosis at all, a
recognition that after thorough consideration the practitioner could
come to no firm conclusion as to the nature of the suspected illness.
This was the most humbling of admissions, one that provided little
comfort to the sufferers or to their families. It could also be a blow
to the career of the practitioner, whose expertise was measured in
terms of the ability to diagnose disorders, prognosticate outcomes,
and provide appropriate therapies. It was a courageous practitioner
who admitted being baffled, particularly in those cases where afflicted
parties and their loved ones wanted the practitioner to corroborate
their preconceptions of witchcraft.
The only first-person account of a New England physicians medical reasoning about a suspected case of witchcraft is from Dr. Nicholas
Augur (c. ), a New Haven physician writing in . His
recently published letter has not been previously utilized by witchcraft
scholars.57 Augurs educational and medical background before com. Cotton Mather, Another brand pluckt out of the burning, in Robert Calef, More
Wonders of the Invisible World [originally published in ] (Bainbridge, N.Y.: York MailPrint, Inc., ), p. .
. Nicholas Augur to John Winthrop Jr., June , in Malcolm Freiberg, ed.,
Winthrop Papers VI (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, ), pp. .
ing to New England is unknown. He arrived in New Haven around

, where he was granted a house lot reserved for an elder. In
, the New Haven Colony Court noted how useful he hath
been in giving physick to many persons, and to some of them freely.
Augur treated the elite in New Haven as well, including the family
of Reverend John Davenport, and appears to have been generally
well respected. Augur was also a merchant and trader and made several
voyages to Boston and likely elsewhere. He died in after a
shipwreck and left a considerable estate.58
Nicholas Augur addressed his letter to John Winthrop Jr. (),
gentleman, entrepreneur, future governor of Connecticut, and the
most respected medical practitioner in the colony. Winthrop corresponded with many leading scientists in England as well as on the
Continent and became one of the first fellows of the Royal Society.
His medical records and letters provide the most extensive repository of medical practice in seventeenth-century New England.59
At least one previous communication by Augur and a reply by Winthrop were sent regarding this case, but they apparently have not
survived.
In his letter of June , Augur describes his care and evaluation
of four young women who displayed symptoms not unlike their
counterparts in Salem nearly forty years later. The major difference
between the two events appears to have been that the New Haven
accusers focused their attention upon only one woman, Elizabeth
Godman, who had already established a reputation in her community
for odd behavior.
Augurs letter begins by thanking Winthrop for his readiness to
be helpful in doubtful cases. Then, Augur immediately proceeds to
the problematical aspects of the case:
. See Edwin P. Augur, Family History and Genealogy of the Descendants of Robert Augur
of New Haven Colony (Middletown, Conn.: Pelton and King, ), pp. . Other later
unpublished letters from Augur on different cases, dated July and May ,
are found in the Winthrop Papers Collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society,
Boston.
. See Robert Black, The Younger John Winthrop (New York: Columbia University
Press, ); Dunn, (n. ) Puritans and Yankees, pp. ; Ronald Sterne Wilkinson, The
alchemical library of John Winthrop Jr. () and his descendants in Colonial America, Ambix, , , . Winthrops early medical correspondence can
be found in Freiberg, (n. ) Winthrop Papers. The bulk of his medical writings remain
unpublished.

I must needs say, the disease where with these women were taken to me
was and still is very dubious not so much in respect to the fit and manner
of taking them as in the causes that went before any of them was taken
with such fits as also in their cure, which to me is as strange and more
strange than the fits themselves if it shall so continue with them.60
Augur noted that since writing his last letter to Winthrop, Elizabeth
Godman was called before the magistrate for some speeches that
had issued from her and that after her examination by the judge,
the girls fits left them, and they never were troubled with them
since.61 Augur thought this
the more strange, that they by all means used by myself, and others, should
find no effective operation, and especially means used for hysterical passionsthey found themselves the worse by themthat now upon this
they should be freed from them, and find themselves in a good state and
health of body. I desire the Lord would bring things to light for to me
they are very obscure.62
Clearly, Augurs first response to the girls illness was to suspect a

natural disease, and he thus prescribed those drugs thought useful.
That these drugs did not work as they were supposed to, and that
the girls improved after the accused witch was brought into court,
were not auspicious developments for Godman.
If so far in this letter Augur is providing a scenario that would
support a diagnosis of diabolical cause, he nevertheless follows by
asserting his unwillingness to let go of a natural explanation. His
differential diagnosis had included three possibilities. I must needs
say, he continued, that strange and various accidents and distempers
do arise both from the obstructions of the spleen as well as from
hysterical passions, and sometimes from the retention or overflowing
of the menses.63 Given these possibilities, Augur reasoned that hysteria was the most likely problem and also suggested a fourth possibility
as to a natural disease.
I did think at first and do still (except they should continue in health by
this means) it had been hysterical, or an inlet into epilepsy, for I observed
. Freiberg, (n. ) Winthrop Papers, pp. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
that those things that were administered, which brought them into the
height of a fever, by which means that load of cold humors that lay at their
stomachs which (as I conceived) hindered respiration, and did intend to
have tried that way of cure and did give them some thing for their present
fits in which they found some ease in respect of their faintness and coldness
they lay on their stomachs, but their fits did continue.64
It was thus with great shock to Augur that the young women suddenly
got better after Elizabeth Godman was hauled into court.
When I went to see them again, they told me they hoped now they were
cured for they found such an alteration in the state of their bodies that
they wondered at, which did confirm them more in their former fears and
jealousies that it might arise from that suspected party, because they found
themselves freed from all their pressures . . . which before they could not.
. . . I shall wait to see what the issue of things shall be.65
The young women continued to improve from their pressures.

The magistrates examined the suspected witch, Elizabeth Godman,
four times and finally ruled that her carriage doth justly render her
suspicious of witchcraft. She was not convicted, but instead it was
ordered that she keep her place and meddle with her own business.
As for Augur, we do not know what, if any, later role he played in
the case. It does seem likely, however, that his search for natural
explanations, his doubts and skepticism, his willingness to consult
with Winthrop, and his unwillingness to give in to the girls fears
and jealousies and declare the cause of their illness to be witchcraft,
were significant factors in saving Elizabeth Godmans life.66
Other physicians likewise came to no definite diagnosis when their
patients suffered strange illnesses. In the Salem transcripts, Nathaniel
and Hannah Ingersoll testified that during the last days of Benjamin
Holtons life, he was behaving in a very strange manner with most
violent fits acting much like to our poor bewitched persons. They
reported that, nevertheless, the doctor that was with him said he
could not tell what his distemper was.67 Elizabeth Symonds, who
suspected and later accused Sarah Wilds of bewitching her, went to
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. For Elizabeth Godmans continuing troubles and fate, see Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting,
pp. .

various doctors, and although they cannot give me any thing that
do me good, none of her physicians apparently confirmed her own
judgment that she had a preternatural disease.68 Some historians have
tried to determine the actual number of people accused of and/or
charged with witchcraft.69 Unfortunately, there is no way of ascertaining how many potential cases were forestalled even before the accusation stage by medical practitioners who either argued for naturalistic
explanations of strange symptoms and behaviors or simply declined
to reinforce their patients fears of the diabolical.
Some medical practitioners in this era, though not publicly challenging the prevailing belief in witchcraft, did appear at least to protect
those accused or offered testimony that undermined others suspicions. As long as John Winthrop Jr. was governor of Connecticut,
no person convicted of witchcraft was executed in that colony. He
played a role in setting aside capital punishment judgments on two
occasions. Only when he traveled to England to get a charter for his
colony did convictions and executions take place.70 Thomas Thacher
(), the minister-physician of Weymouth, acting in his ministerial capacity, wrote a powerful letter of defense in for one of
his parishioners, Welthean Richards, that appeared to discourage
others from putting her on trial for witchcraft.71 Reverend John Hale,
apparently writing of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in about the late
s noted that a surgeon, Mr. Day, had accurately accounted for
the timing of a wound suffered by a female patient accused of witchcraft. Her male accuser believed he had delivered a blow to her when
she was in the form of a cat or imp at the same time Days patient
actually became hurt.72 In a similar story set around , in Newbury,
. Ibid., vol. , .
. Demos, (n. ) Entertaining Satan, pp. ; Godbeer, (n. ) Devils Dominion, pp.
.
. Nathaniel Greensmith, Rebecca Greensmith, probably Mary Barnes, and possibly
Mary Sanford were executed as a result of the Hartford witch hunt early in while
Winthrop was abroad. After Winthrop returned, he refused to carry out the sentence against
Elizabeth Seager rendered by the court in . In , Winthrop was part of the court
that set aside the death sentence of Katherine Harrison. See Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, pp.
, ; Black, (n. ) The Younger John Winthrop, pp. .
. Thomas Thacher to John Wilson and others, February /, in Freiberg, (n.
) Winthrop Papers VI, pp. .
. Hale, (n. ) A Modest Enquiry, pp. .
Dr. John Dole () was cited in testimony offered in Elizabeth

Morses trial as affirming that she had no green [fresh] wound on
her head, which would have coincided with Jonathan Woodmans
frightening and violent encounter with a cat.73
It is hardly surprising, however, in witchcraft cases that made their
way to court, the preponderance of doctors opinions, at least as
retold in laypersons testimonies, were in favor of diabolism. After
unsuccessfully treating the Goodwin children who were visited with
strange fits, Cotton Mathers friend, Harvard-educated Dr. Thomas
Oakes (), found himself so affronted by the distempers
of the children, that he concluded nothing but an hellish witchcraft
could be the original of these maladies.74 Samuel Perley sought
treatment for his ten-year-old daughter from several doctors and
they told us that she was under an evil hand.75 Similar judgments
were made by other practitioners.
Historians have strongly argued that background factors, such as
continuing war with the Indians, political upheaval in Massachusetts,
and the perceived loss of status by the clergy, helped engender the
panic conditions that characterized the events in Salem Village and
elsewhere in . One must also give due weight to the foreground
activities of some physicians in helping to create a climate of fear and
suspicion in Essex County in the years preceding these events.
Dr. Anthony Crosby () was cited in two witchcraft cases
in the Salem trials, though he had long been dead. Born in England,
he was raised by his grandfather, who brought him to Rowley, Massachusetts, and had him apprentice with a Roxbury physician in the
late s. He seems to have commenced his own practice around
in Rowley and in other towns in Essex County.76 The first
mention of his involvement with a witchcraft determination occurred
in when he and Dr. Fuller were called to attend Elizabeth
Brown, who had been under a strange kind of distemper and phrensy
uncapible of any rational action though strong and healthy of body.
. Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, p. .

. Mather, (n. ) Memorial Providences, p. .
. Eleanor Davis Crosby, Simon Crosby the Emmigrant (Boston: George H. Ellis, ),
pp. .

According to her husband, William Brown, the two doctors did
both say that her distemper was supernatural and no sickness of body
but that some evil person had bewitched her.77 The second mention
of Crosby refers to circa , when the doctor treated James Carr.
Dr. Crosby gave me a great deal of physick but could not make
none work, Carr recounted, whereupon he told me that he believed
I was behagged; and I told him I thought so a good while. And he
asked me by whom. I told him I did not care for speaking for one
was counted an honest woman. But he urging I told him and he
said he did believe that Mrs. Bradbury was a great deal worse than
Goody Martin.78
If the testimony of Carr was accurate, Dr. Crosby exceeded his
medical role. The function of a physician was either to rule in or
rule out natural causes, not to encourage patients to name names or
point suspicion at particular persons. That Crosby gave his damning
opinion of Mrs. Mary Bradbury is particularly interesting because
she was a midwife and healer and thus a competitor.79 Early in his
career, Dr. Crosby testified against Lynn doctress Ann Edmonds,
who years later was accused of witchcraft.80 This element of malepractitioner antagonism over competition with women is woven into
other cases as well. Occasionally, women fought back against physicians accusations. In New Hampshire, Jane Walford successfully sued
Dr. Robert Couch (fl. ) for slander in for saying the
said Jane was a witch and he would prove her one.81
As for Dr. Crosby, it appears that at the same time he was treating
James Carr, he himself was impaired. Crosby lost several costly lawsuits
in the s and had taken to drink. In the spring of , Dr. Crosby
confessed in court, I speak not this in any way of excuse for myself
respecting drunkenness at other times for I have horribly and abundantly very often provoked God . . . abused myself, spent my time
and a greater part of my estate, hazarded the lives and health of those
. Ibid., vol , .
. Trial records for Mary Bradbury are in ibid., vol. , .
. See Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts (Salem: Essex
Institute, ), vol. , . Dr. Phillip Reades testimony in was directed at Lynn
doctress Ann Burt. See Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, pp. .
. Karlsen, (n. ) The Devil, pp. .
patients who have relied upon me for cure by neglecting seasonable

attendance as rules of art require.82 Crosbys need to damn competitors, his drinking problem, and his spending insufficient time with
patients, were all latent but potent factors that could facilitate a
diagnosis of witchcraft.
Some Essex county physicians avoided a full medical analysis of
suspicious cases and made snap judgments. In , Dr. Anthony
Randall (fl. after ) of Salem was called to aid Daniel Willkins
when the latter was struck speechless and spat food out at those who
tried to feed him. We sent to the French doctor [Randall], James
Herrick testified, but he sent word again that it was not a natural
cause but absolutely witchcraft to his judgment.83 Randall had not
even seen the patient. In , Dr. Phillip Reade (ca. ) was
asked three times to examine Sara Townsend and her sister Elizabeth
Carter. In his deposition, Reade declared of the former, he had no
opportunity to examine her condition but did plainly perceive there
was no natural cause for such unnatural fits. Reade did manage to
interview her on his fourth visit and this satisfied him that his diagnosis
was correct.84
For Dr. Reade and others, the itinerant nature of their practice
may have contributed to their rapid diagnoses. Reade traveled a
circuit throughout Essex county and elsewhere, including the towns
of Concord, Sudbury, Billerica, Woburn, Reading, Lynn, and Salem.
He spent a few weeks in one place before moving on to another
town. His continuing success as a practitioner therefore depended
on curing or helping most of his patients in a relatively short period
of time. Thus Reade and other itinerants might be more likely to
attribute strange and difficult diseases to diabolism because of their
limited residency and the need to preserve their reputation. Declaring
a suspicious case to be witchcraft, particularly where patients or their
families were already supportive of this diagnosis, had little negative
consequence to the practitioner without roots in the community.
Furthermore, by attributing a disease to witchcraft, the physician was
freed from any responsibility for not benefiting the patient. In his
. Records and Files, (n. ), vol. , .
. Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, p. .

career, Reade made charges or was otherwise involved in three separate court cases that involved allegations of witchcraft.85
Finally, where learned practitioners tended to draw a distinction
between professional and lay diagnostic methods of witchcraft, unlearned, or largely self-taught male healers, might well have blurred
the differences. The most notable example of this was Dr. Roger
Toothacre (ca. ) of Billerica whose practice included Essex
county and who died in prison awaiting trial for witchcraft. Instead
of dismissing counter-magic as superstitious or even diabolical, Toothacre embraced these officially proscribed measures and not only diagnosed witchcraft but helped sufferers and their families set traps to
catch suspected malefactors. In his testimony at the Salem trials,
Thomas Gage recalled that Dr. Toothacre was in his house in Beverly
the previous spring when they had a conversation about the child of
John Maston of Salem that was then sick and having unwonted fits
and Phillip Whites child of Beverly who was then strangely sick.
Toothacre told Gage he had seen them both already and that his
opinion was they were under an evil hand. Toothacre further said
his daughter had killed a witch. When Gage asked him how she did
it, Toothacre said he taught her and that she got some of the afflicted
persons urine and put it into an earthen pot and stopped said pot
very close in a hot oven and stopped up said oven and the next
morning said witch was dead.86 Toothacres familiarity with and use
of these questionable methods only cast doubt on the source of his
powers. With Crosby, Fuller, Randall, Reade, Toothacre and other
doctors making accusations, spreading stories, and legitimizing witchcraft folklore in Essex County from the late s onward, laypersons
fear of witchcraft could only be heightened within the communities
these doctors served and elsewhere.
Since the nineteenth century, historians and others have identified
Dr. William Griggs as the physician who diagnosed the girls of Salem
Village as being bewitched.87 Griggs had moved from up the coast
in Gloucester to Salem Village about a year earlier. But there is no
. See Andrew V. Rapoza, The trials of Phillip Reade, seventeenth-century itinerant
physician, Dublin Semin. N. Engl. Folklife, , , .
. Boyer and Nissenbaum, (n. ) Salem Witchcraft Papers, vol. , , .
. Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts [originally published in ] (New
York: Doubleday, ), pp. ; Godbeer, (n. ) Devils Dominion, p. ; Boyer and
Nissebaum, (n. ) Salem Possessed, p. .
contemporary evidence that Dr. Griggs made this fateful determination. Although he is mentioned in the trial transcripts and other
primary sources, it is only in connection with his niece, one of the
afflicted, and for his continuing support of the towns minister, Samuel
Parris, whom some in the community later blamed for the panic.88
While it seems likely, given his proximity, that Griggs would have
been the first physician called, it is clear that if he was, he did not
immediately judge the ailments to be diabolical. Reverend John Hale,
who was an active participant in the Salem trials, wrote that when
Reverend Parriss daughter and niece became ill, Parris made his
application to physicians; yet still they grew worse. And at length
one physician gave his opinion that they were under an evil hand.89
While it is certainly possible that Dr. Griggs made this ultimate
determination, it could just as likely have been an itinerant physician such as Drs. Reade or Toothacre, a nearby practitioner such
as Dr. Randall of Salem, Dr. John Barton of Marblehead who led
a panel of women searching for witches marks on some of the accused, or any one of several other practitioners within a short ride
of Salem Village whose names have never been associated with these
events.90
After the Salem Village girls made their accusations in court, the
one physician who could have had a significant say in the disposition
of these matters was Wait Winthrop (), son of John Winthrop Jr., who served as one of the judges at Salem. The younger
Winthrop had attended Harvard, where he decided to pursue medical
studies. He did not remain in school for his degree, however, and
whether he studied the medical art with someone other than his
. Boyer and Nissenbaum, (n. ) Salem Witchcraft Papers, vol. , , Lawson, (n. )
Brief and True, pp. ; Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., Salem Village Witchcraft:
A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in New England (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, ), pp. . For biographical information on Griggs, see Harriet S. Tapley,
Early physicians of Danvers, Hist. Collect. Danvers Hist. Soc., , , ; H. Minot
Pitman, Early Griggs families of Massachusetts, N. Engl. Hist. Geneal. Reg., , ,
. Anthony S. Patton, The witch doctor Harvard Med. Bull., , , accepts
without question that Griggs made the fateful diagnosis that the girls were under an evil
hand.
. Hale, (n. ) A Modest Enquiry, p. .
. For John Barton, see Boyer and Nissenbaum (n. ) Salem Witchcraft Papers, vol. ,
. Other physicians in the near vicinity of Salem Village in were John Fiske of
Wenham, Samuel Hardie of Beverly, David Bennett of Rowley, Philemon Dane of Ipswich,
and James Holgrave of Salem.

father is unclear. For most of his adult life, Wait Winthrop lived the
life of a gentleman, mostly in Boston, managing family business
ventures, serving in various military capacities (rising to the rank of
Major-General and commander of the Massachusetts forces), serving
in government as one of that colonys assistants and magistrates, and
practicing medicine, like his father, without remuneration.91 But
where John Winthrop Jr., as judged by his actions, may have been
skeptical of charges of witchcraft or at the very least protective of
the accused, his son Wait was far more willing to believe the tales
of spectral terror. Indeed, Cotton Mathers Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions () was dedicated to Wait Winthrop,
who, Mather noted, I reckon among the best of my friends and the
ablest of my readers. Your knowledge has qualified you to make those
reflections on the following relations.92 The younger Winthrop may
have emulated his friend Mather in his efforts to scientifically
explain the mysteries of witchcraft. Thomas Brattle, in his open letter
of October , could well have been speaking of Winthrop, or
his fellow judge and apothecary Bartholemew Gedney ()
when he noted that,
The Salem judges, at least some of them, do assert, that the cure of the
afflicted persons is a natural effect of the touch; and they are so well
instructed in the Cartesian philosophy, and in the doctrine of effluvia that
they undertake to give a demonstration how this touch does cure the
afflicted persons; and the account they give of it is this, that by this touch,
the venomous and malignant particles that were ejected from the eye, do,
by this means, return to the body whence they came, and so leave the
afflicted persons pure and whole.93
Of this theory, Brattle caustically noted, I must confess to you that

I am no small admirer of the Cartesian philosophy, but yet I have
not so learned it. Certainly this is a strain that it will by no means
allow of.94 Whether he believed in this theory or not, Wait Win-
. Dunn, (n. ) Puritans and Yankees, pp. .

. Mather, (n. ) Memorial Providences, pp. .
. Thomas Brattle, Letter dated October , , in Burr, (n. ) Narratives, p. .
. Ibid.
throps medical beliefs and knowledge would hardly serve the interests
of the accused in his courtroom.95
As the Salem trials continued late in , many of the intellectual
elite in New England turned against the judges because of the emphasis given to spectral or ghostly evidence in the proceedings, including
the summoning of the shade of the not-so-lately departed Dr. Zerobbabel Endecott ().96 The elite also became hostile toward the
afflicted girls for their accusations of publicly respected figures. It was
one thing to accuse poor, old women who led marginal existences,
and quite another to point a finger at pillars of the community such
as the wife of Reverend John Hale. While staunchly maintaining
their belief in the reality of witchcraft per se, members of the clergy
now publicly argued and lobbied against some of the courts actions,
and as a consequence, the trials were temporarily halted, and the
suspects still crowding the jails were eventually set free. Not only did
the technical aspects of court procedure bother many of the critics,
the whole enterprise was in doubt.97
If health care practitioners were more significantly involved in
preternatural determinations than previously appreciated, did they
also play a more important role in ending witchcraft accusations than
they are currently credited? Here again, the evidence suggests that
this was the case. One opponent of the Salem trials was Dr. Thomas
Graves () of Charleston, who had served as a magistrate.98
Two minister-physicians, Joseph Eliot () and Timothy Woodbridge (ca. ), advised the Connecticut Court in concerning the Fairfield witches, Goodwife Clauson and Mercy Disborough, that
ye unusual excresences found upon their bodies ought not to be allowed
as evidence against them without the approbation of some able physicians
. . . . respecting the evidence of the afflicted maid we find some things
. Waits son John, who also practiced medicine gave credence in to similar types
of sympathetic correspondences of even earlier vintage. See John Winthrop to Cotton
Mather, New London, November , in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. th Ser., , , .
. Boyer and Nissenbaum, (n. ) Salem Witchcraft Papers, vol. , , .
. Godbeer, (n. ) Devils Dominion, pp. , Hoffer, (n. ) The Devils Disciples, pp.
.
. Brattle, (n. ) Letter, p. .

testified carrying a suspicion of counterfeiting; others that plainly intimate her trouble from the mother [hysteria] which improved by craft may
produce the most of those strange and unusual effects affirmed of her; and
of those things that by some may be thought to be diabolical or effects of
witchcraft.99
Physicians were beginning to speak up. Dr. Gershom Bulkeley

(), then the most influential physician in Connecticut,
who decades earlier when he served as a minister wrote a brief on
evidence in witchcraft trials which made convictions easier, now
raised questions about the prosecution of Mercy Disborough.100 When
in the Boston apothecary Benjamin Davis () sent
Bulkeley a copy of Robert Calef s harsh book attacking Cotton
Mather and the witchcraft trials, Bulkeley had little good to say about
Calef but noted to Davis I wish N[ew] E[ngland] have not a great
deal of innocent blood to answer for both of former and later times.101
After the panic of , the Quaker apothecary Thomas Maule
(), who appears to have previously supported witchcraft
accusations, lambasted Massachusetts authorities for their actions in
Salem in his book. Maule was brought to court by authorities for
his scandalous work but was found not guilty by a jury.102 Michael
Wigglesworth (), the Congregational minister, poet, and
physician of Malden, was active in the effort to have the colony
recompense the survivors and the families of those who had been
jailed and executed.103 And in , when one of his patients was
rumored to be a witch, Dr. Nathanial Hall (died after ) of
Massachusetts wrote a letter to the authorities noting that those
spreading rumors about the suspect were making totally unwarranted
. Hansen, (n. ) Witchcraft at Salem, pp. .
. Hansen, (n. ) Witchcraft at Salem, pp. ; Hall (n. ) Witch-Hunting, pp. ;
Thomas W. Jodziewicz, A stranger in the land: Gershom Bulkeley of Connecticut, Trans.
Am. Phil. Soc., , , part , .
. Gershom Bulkeley to [Benjamin Davis], March /, Jeffries Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. This letter is partially printed in Jodziewicz, (n. ), p. .
. Thomas Maule, The Truth Held Forth and Maintained [originally published ] and
New Englands Persecutors Mauled With Their Own Weapons [originally published ] reprinted in James Edward Maule, Better That One Hundred Witches Should Live (Villanova,
Penn.: Jembook, ). See also Hale, (n. ) A Modest Enquiry, pp. . Maules career
as an apothecary has generally gone unnoticed by historians but see Rapoza, (n. ), p. ;
Norman Gevitz, Pray let the medicines be good: The New England apothecary in the
th and early th centuries, Pharm. Hist., in press.
. John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.: C.W. Sever, ), vol. , pp. .
accusations because of the poor womans physical infirmities. Dr.

Hall also may have been the driving force in a petition drive by
neighbors to defend her name.104
But the principal role of physicians in stopping witchcraft accusations cannot be found in the public records. Physicians and other
health care practitioners no longer seriously considered witchcraft in
their differential diagnosis when natural causes, however vague or
imprecise, could explain suspicious illness and death. Practitioners
increasingly concluded that the cause of suspicious illnesses was internal and natural, not external and supernatural. By no longer giving
credence to witchcraft claims, physicians at the bedside were able to
short-circuit the process which led from suspicion to accusation to
conviction. To be sure, belief in witchcraft by common folk did not
die. Witchcraft simply lost credibility among the educated, including
health care practitioners, who increasingly identified with the values
and world view of the early Enlightenment.105
The medical community was changing its outlook. A mechanistic
and more materialistic view of the universe and its workings, beginning in the mid- to late seventeenth century, gradually helped transform the way physicians conceived of the workings of the body and
encouraged doctors to reject causal explanations such as diabolism
or astrology that failed to meet new thresholds of what was considered
reasonable.106 Furthermore, New England ministers, deeply chastened by the events at Salem, had become far less willing to support
preternatural explanations for suspicious diseases, thereby giving physicians more power and greater latitude in their decision-making.
Thus, by treating illnesses once considered diabolical and as the proper
province of ministers, medicine was now able to expand both its
perceived occupational domain and perceived areas of expertise.
Physicians in the early- to mid-eighteenth century might have
been as puzzled as were their predecessors by the strange behavior
. George Lincoln, History of Hingham (Cambridge, Mass.: Town of Cambridge, ),
vol. , .
. For the decline but persistence in America of such beliefs, see Herbert Leventhal,
In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth Century
America (New York: New York University Press, ).
. See Thomas, (n. ) Religion, pp. . One of the last significant European medical
figures to publicly maintain a belief in witchcraft was Friedrich Hoffman (). See
Lester S. King, Friedrich Hoffman and some medical aspects of witchcraft, Clio Med.,
, , .

of young women or others manifesting symptoms similar to those
afflicted persons of Salem Village. They might also have been even
less successful in effecting a cure. The crucial difference was that
diabolism was no longer seriously considered in the differential diagnosis, and the physician, not the cleric, was the principal professional
who was expected to manage the case from start to end. Medicine
in New England changed with respect to the witchcraft controversy
after , not because of a medical discovery per se, but by the
institutionalization of a more naturalistic way of thinking.

"The Devil Hath Laughed at The Physicians": Witchcraft and Medical Practice in Seventeenth - Century New England

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"The Devil Hath Laughed at The Physicians": Witchcraft and Medical Practice in Seventeenth - Century New England

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The Devil Hath Laughed

at the Physicians: Witchcraft

ESPITE what has become nearly a cottage industry

Journal of the History of Medicine

century medical practice in New England as it related to witchcraft

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

It is argued here that the medical arts played a significant and

Journal of the History of Medicine

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

preponderance of their works rested on naturalistic explanations for

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

based on public acceptance and satisfaction. No one could practice

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

seizures, might well be considered strange by onlookers, the so-called

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

accompany typical symptoms in any disease and that drugs do not

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

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torture were but products of deranged imagination. On trial for her

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Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

laughed at the physicians, who have thought by medicinal applications

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

ing to New England is unknown. He arrived in New Haven around

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Clearly, Augurs first response to the girls illness was to suspect a

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

The young women continued to improve from their pressures.

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

Dr. John Dole () was cited in testimony offered in Elizabeth

. Hall, (n. ) Witch-Hunting, p. .

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Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

patients who have relied upon me for cure by neglecting seasonable

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

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Of this theory, Brattle caustically noted, I must confess to you that

. Dunn, (n. ) Puritans and Yankees, pp. .

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

Physicians were beginning to speak up. Dr. Gershom Bulkeley

Gevitz : Witchcraft and Medical Practice

accusations because of the poor womans physical infirmities. Dr.

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. , January

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