The Treatment of Bewitchment in a Puritan Community

This paper deals with the methods of treatment employed during the witchcraft epidemic which occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in the year 1692. The bewitched persons were restricted in their choice of treatment, because, as members of the Puritan Church, they must participate neither in the sacrament of exorcism nor in magic rites; still they hit upon some conventional and other original methods of cure which served them very well.

These effective cures I have compared with the treatment which was available for the generality of bewitched persons in the seventeenth century; and from the comparison I have learned which psychological mechanisms operated not only in the rites that were forbidden the Salem patients, but also in those that cured them—indispensable mechanisms these. The cures which were successful at Salem can then be compared with others which were recommended to the Salem patients but were rejected by them. In this case it is possible to see which psychological mechanisms the sufferers avoided, and to speculate on the reasons for their neglect.

I begin by giving a brief account of the witchcraft epidemic, for some facts about it throw light on the character of the bewitched persons. A dozen puritan girls whose ages ranged from ten to twenty-six years began suddenly to behave strangely. Sometimes they were excited and violent, at others melancholy and suffering; at last, developing painful physical symptoms, they accused certain unpopular neighbours of afflicting them by witchcraft. As fast as these persons were cast into prison the girls accused others of continuing the affliction, and others, again, took their place as suspected persons. So the epidemic went on until nineteen villagers had been hanged, two had died in gaol, more than 500 had suffered privation and ruin through long imprisonment, and the whole countryside had been made desolate.

There is no reason to suppose that the patients first developed their neurosis because external events p