ABSTRACT
Anne gunter's afflictions first beset her around midsummer 1604, while her father himself was ill at Oxford. We know little of the details of this first bout of Anne's sufferings, but it is certain that witchcraft was not yet being discussed as a cause. As Brian Gunter testified, his daughter was thought to be afflicted by ‘the mother’, or hysteria, at this stage. It was when the illness recurred on 23 October, and continued over the following weeks, that people began to take more note of the symptoms. Even then, however, a natural malady was assumed, although, as Brian Gunter put it, the disease now seemed to resemble the ‘failing sickness’, epilepsy, rather than ‘the mother’. But Brian was again absent at this point, serving on a jury in London, and it was his wife, Anne, who was responsible for coping with their daughter's strange sickness. She called in a number of doctors. The first to see Anne, a Dr Cheyney of Wallingford, ‘was of the opinion that the said Anne was not sick of any natural cause or infirmity yet did minister a purge unto her. And that time notwithstanding her fits continued & grew to be worse & worse’. Bartholomew Warner, an Oxford-based doctor, confirmed that the Gunters had called in several men of his profession, and that they ‘were of opinion that the said Anne was not sick of any natural cause or infirmity’.
