When Europeans had just made themselves known to America, they believed that evil was lurking at every turn. Puritans feared the devil, the Indians, and the ubiquitous witches. They believed that the latter brought disease on them. They had their own remedies for that, which give a shudder of disgust today ...
The first American university was founded in 1632 in Massachusetts Bay Colony, but the medical faculty was not established until 1782. So the colonists were usually treated by Puritans who had received their education in British schools and decided to go overseas.
Therefore, in this part of the world it was extremely difficult to find a real doctor. He was not in the city of Salem, nor in the smaller settlement of the same name. Instead of scientific knowledge, the American Puritans had folk remedies that could often do more harm than help. As Stacy Schiff reminds us in the book "Witches. Salem 1692 ” :
Basic pharmaceuticals were no different from those used in ancient Greece. Drugs such as beetle blood, fox lung or dried delphine heart were used. Snails were an important component of compresses and powders, easier to obtain than a unicorn's horn.
Interesting recipes have survived from the times of the first British colonists in America. One of the Salem practitioners left a notebook filled with them. The recipes include a remedy for a person immersed in bad emotions (provided it is a woman). Do you want to make them? Take the milk of a woman who is nursing a male infant and the blood of a cat.
However, you cannot do anything to drop it. You have to catch the animal and cut off one of its ears, or just a piece of it, and let the blood drip straight into the milk. Then the resulting liquid should be given to the sick woman to drink. Repeat the entire procedure three times.
The curiosity is based on Stacy Schiff's book 'Witches. Salem 1692 ”, which has just been released by Wydawnictwo Marginesy.
What is worth emphasizing, the above recipe sounds a bit like a recipe for a magic elixir. Still, it is by no means the strangest or the most repulsive plaster. As Stacy Schiff explains in the book "Witches. Salem 1692 ” :
Rendered fat from a toasted hedgehog put into the ear was "an excellent remedy for deafness". For epileptics, a wolfskin harness reportedly worked wonders, as did the baked black cow dung and powdered frog liver, taken five times a day.
Reading about these medical methods, it is hard to believe that the doctors or feldshers using them were not suspected of witchcraft. With them, considering saltpeter as the best remedy for measles, headache and sciatica, or the opinion that forty drops of lavender and a mighty bite of gingerbread will remedy memory loss, seem like a child's play!
Puritans on the shores of America (photo:public domain)
The girls who started the madness of the Salem witchcraft trials were examined by one of the doctors living in Cologne. William Griggs was exceptionally devout, reported on those who missed services, had nine books on medicine, could read but could not write.
It was him who asked to evaluate the strange behavior of the girls Abigail and Betty, the local pastor Samuel Parris. The diagnosis was terrifying. According to the doctor, the children were tormented not by any earthly disease, but by an "invisible hand".
Source:
Trivia is the essence of our website. Short materials devoted to interesting anecdotes, surprising details from the past, strange news from the old press. Reading that will take you no more than 3 minutes, based on single sources. This particular material is based on the book:
- Stacy Schiff, Witches. Salem 1692 , Marginesy 2019 Publishing House.
Get to know the backstage of the most famous witchcraft trial:
