ABSTRACT
In Salem, New England, in 1692, nineteen individuals were hanged and one was pressed to death for witchcraft; over one hundred others were tried and imprisoned for suspected witchcraft. According to Increase Mather, the then President of Harvard College, that renowned seat of learning in the New World, the ‘preternatural’ actions of the Devil were clearly to be seen in the evidence of the bite marks, pinching, bruising, fits, twisting, bodily contortions and strange halfclosed eyes of the victims, as well as the clear evidence of the existence of the witches’ Familiars and Black Men.1 Some three centuries later, a medical framework of interpretation appears more plausible: far from being evidence, as Increase Mather argued, of the ‘preternatural’ work of the Devil, the fits, pinching and pricking sensations, swollen throats, hallucinations and other afflictions of the alleged victims of witchcraft are interpreted by one late twentieth-century scholar as the symptoms of encephelitis lethargica, an epidemic of which also had swept Europe in the period 1916-30 with patients displaying very similar symptoms.2 Similarly, while in seventeenth-century England there were earnest discussions of precisely what physical ‘proofs’ there might be of having entered a pact with the Devil, by the mid-nineteenth century such ‘proofs’ were no longer as convincing, and rather more ‘naturalistic’ explanations appeared more plausible in accounting for precisely the same ‘evidence’. As Charles Upham put it in 1867:
It was believed that the Devil affixed his mark to the bodies of those in alliance with him, and that the point where his mark was made became callous and dead . . . [I]f, as might have been expected, particularly in aged persons, any spot could be found insensible to torture [usually pricking with a pin by a member of the jury – MF], or any excrescence, induration or fixed discoloration, it was looked upon as visible evidence and demonstration of guilt.3
