Salem Witch Trial Vs McCarthyism

A review of A Fever in Salem: A New Interpretation of the New England Witch Trials, by Laurie Winn Carlson, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2000; 224 pp. $14.95 Paperback. ISBN: 1-566633095

A FEVER IN SALEM POSITS A biological cause for the early modem witchcraft epidemic, which resulted in the hanging of 19 people in Salem, MA, in 1692. Witchcraft persecution, Laurie Carlson writes, arose because of the strange behavior of the supposedly bewitched accusers. She concludes that the cause was a disease unrecognizable by the science of the time: encephalitis.

The history of the Salem witchcraft epidemic is well known. In the winter of 1692, two girls suffered convulsions and hallucinations, alarming fast their families and subsequently the entire community. When a medical diagnosis was not forthcoming, a religious explanation was accepted: the girls were acting strangely because "the hand of Satan was in them." The drama was intensified because the two girls were the daughter and niece of the town's minister.

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Incident turned into epidemic when the girls were pressured to name the person who had bewitched them. Before the winter snow melted other town residents exhibited strange symptoms and accusations of the crime of witchcraft spread like a contagion. "Sickness as a result of sin was a common theme for [Reverend] Parris that spring," Carlson writes (55). The fast trial for witchcraft was held in June, and by September no less than 19 were convicted and hanged for it. Legal proceedings were eventually halted and those who remained in jail on witchcraft charges were freed. Historians of the Salem tragedy are divided over the question of whose behavior needs to be explained: the town leaders or the supposedly bewitched accusers. A Fever in Salem focuses exclusively on the latter.

"People of all cultures and ages," Carlson writes, "create explanations for phenomena they do not understand" (72). Where court transcripts and other sources of the time describe "fits," the author sees "convulsions;" when records use the phrase "spectral visions," Carlson takes this to mean "hallucinations." These small but important adjustments to terminology sharpen the author's focus: what disease creates these symptoms? Her answer is "encephalitis lethargica," or sleeping sickness.

Carlson devotes three chapters to the history of encephalitis, focusing on the outbreak of 1916-1930. (This disease was made famous in more recent years by the book and film Awakenings, about the work of Oliver Sacks.) Carlson explains that there are multiple types of the disease and that its cause remains unknown.

She then applies the disease model to the 1692 witch craze. If you are familiar with both witchcraft historiography and the medical and historical background of encephalitis, Chapter 6 is all you need to read. With concision

uncharacteristic of the rest of the book, it contain s most of the evidence for the author's epidemiological theory of the events at Salem. Carlson explains in detail how birds could have brought the disease from Europe and passed it on to mosquitoes. Most of the town's accused witches were young women, and Carlson reasons that they had chores which brought them unusually close to the water where mosquitoes breed. The author also mentions that the end of the epidemic was concurrent with the arrival of the cooler air. Perhaps even ticks were the agent.

Interestingly, Carlson suggests that in the 16th century "benevolent witches were replaced by evil entitities" (4). The Afterword, "Satanic Possession and Christian Beliefs," takes pains to suggest that a scientific explanation of some demonic possession need not negate the possibility that Satan can actually possess people. Is Carlson suggesting the epidemic actually had supernatural influences?

Carlson also takes aim at the psychological profession, as she does in an earlier footnote comparing the late 15th century witch hunting guidebook, The Malleus Maleficarum, with the handbook of the American Psychological Association, the DSM-IV.

Readers of SKEPTIC may be especially interested in Carlson's brief mention of women "taken by planets" while they slept, remarkably similar to modern descriptions of alien abductions.

As interesting as all this is, especially to skeptics in search of natural causes for apparently supernatural events, A Fever in Salem is far from exemplary. Fundamentally, the evidence offered for the epidemiological hypothesis is inconclusive. I do not doubt Carlson's statement that historical epidemiology is inherently plausible, but this does