Medical explanations of bewitchment

[1][2][3] The theory was first widely publicized in 1976, when graduate student Linnda R. Caporael published an article[4] in Science, making the claim that the hallucinations of the afflicted girls could possibly have been the result of ingesting rye bread that had been made with moldy grain.

Ergot of Rye is a plant disease caused by the fungus Claviceps purpurea, which Caporael claims is consistent with many of the physical symptoms of those alleged to be afflicted by witchcraft.

Within seven months, however, an article disagreeing with this theory was published in the same journal by Spanos and Gottlieb[5][6] They performed a wider assessment of the historical records, examining all the symptoms reported by those claiming affliction, among other things, that In 1989, Mary Matossian reopened the issue, supporting Caporeal, including putting an image of ergot-infected rye on the cover of her book, Poisons of the Past.

Wabanaki allies of the French attacked British colonists in Maine, New Hampshire, and northern Massachusetts in a series of guerrilla skirmishes.

In the Salem witch trials, elite men were accused of witchcraft, some of them the same leaders who failed to successfully protect besieged settlements to the north.

They include: Psychologists Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb explain that the afflicted were enacting the roles that maintained their definition of themselves as bewitched, and this in turn led to the conviction of many of the accused that the symptoms, such as bites, pinches and pricks, were produced by specters.

[16] Starkey acknowledges that, while the afflicted girls were physically healthy before their fits began, they were not spiritually well because they were sickened from trying to cope with living in an adult world that did not cater to their needs as children.

Her mother experienced paranoid tendencies from previous tragedies in her life, and when Ann Jr. began to experience hysterical fits, her symptoms verged on psychotic.

[13] Historian John Demos in 1970[17] adopted a psycho-historical approach to confronting the unusual behavior displayed by the afflicted girls in Salem during 1692.

The violent fits and verbal attacks experienced at Salem were directly related to the process of projection, as Demos explains, Demos asserts that the violent fits displayed, often aimed at figures of authority, were attributed to bewitchment because it allowed the afflicted youth to project their repressed aggression and not be directly held responsible for their behaviors because they were coerced by the Devil.

Therefore, aggression experienced because of witchcraft became an outlet and the violent fits and the physical attacks endured, inside and outside the courtroom, were examples of how each girl was undergoing the psychological process of projection.