Remember the theology and the diabology of the time. Mr. Cotton's Theocracy was a royal government, with the King of kings as its nominal head, but with an upper chamber of saints, and a tremendous opposition in the lower house; the leader of which may have been equalled, but cannot have been surpassed by any of our earth-born politicians. The demons were prowling round the houses every night, as the foxes were sneaking about the hen-roosts. The men of Gloucester fired whole flasks of gunpowder at devils disguised as Indians and Frenchmen.
How deeply the notion of miraculous interference with the course of nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superstition about earthquakes. We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop, father of the old judge and the "squire," whom many of us Cambridge people remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned and excellent Dr. Prince, of the Old South Church, for discussing their phenomena as if they belonged to the province of natural science:
Not for the sake of degrading the aspect of the noble men who founded our State, do I refer to their idle beliefs and painful delusions, but to show against what influences the common sense of the medical profession had to assert itself.
Think, then, of the blazing stars, that shook their horrid hair in the sky; the phantom ship, that brought its message direct from the other world; the story of the mouse and the snake at Watertown; of the mice and the prayer-book; of the snake in church; of the calf with two heads; and of the cabbage in the perfect form of a cutlash, --all which innocent occurrences were accepted or feared as alarming portents.
We can smile at these: but we cannot smile at the account of unhappy Mary Dyer's malformed offspring; or of Mrs. Hutchinson's domestic misfortune of similar character, in the story of which the physician, Dr. John Clark of Rhode Island, alone appears to advantage; or as we read the Rev. Samuel Willard's fifteen alarming pages about an unfortunate young woman suffering with hysteria. Or go a little deeper into tragedy, and see poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia, first admonished, then whipped; at last, taking her own little daughter's life; put on trial, and standing mute, threatened to be pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying to be beheaded; and none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder.
The cooper's crazy wife--crazy in the belief that she has committed the unpardonable sin--tries to drown her child, to save it from misery; and the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day in a quiet asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself." Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all our children's hands; a story in which the awful image of the man in the cage might well turn the nursery where it is read into a madhouse?
The miserable delusion of witchcraft illustrates, in a still more impressive way, the false ideas which governed the supposed relation of men with the spiritual world. I have no doubt many physicians shared in these superstitions. Mr. Upham says they--that is, some of them--were in the habit of attributing their want of success to the fact, that an "evil hand" was on their patient. The temptation was strong, no doubt, when magistrates and ministers and all that followed their lead were contented with such an explanation. But how was it in Salem, according to Mr. Upham's own statement? Dr. John Swinnerton was, he says, for many years the principal physician of Salem. And he says, also, "The Swinnerton family were all along opposed to Mr. Parris, and kept remarkably clear from the witchcraft delusion." Dr. John Swinnerton--the same, by the way, whose memory is illuminated by a ray from the genius of Hawthorne--died the very year before the great witchcraft explosion took place. But who can doubt that it was from him that the family had learned to despise and to resist the base superstition; or that Bridget Bishop, whose house he rented, as Mr. Upham tells me, the first person hanged in the time of the delusion, would have found an efficient protector in her tenant, had he been living, to head the opposition of his family to the misguided clergymen and magistrates?
I cannot doubt that our early physicians brought with them many Old-
World medical superstitions, and I have no question that they were more or less involved in the prevailing errors of the community in which they lived. But, on the whole, their record is a clean one, so far as we can get at it; and where it is questionable we must remember that there must have been many little-educated persons among them; and that all must have felt, to some extent, the influence of those sincere and devoted but unsafe men, the physic-practising clergymen, who often used spiritual means as a substitute for temporal ones, who looked upon a hysteric patient as possessed by the devil, and treated a fractured skull by prayers and plasters, following the advice of a ruling elder in opposition to the unanimous opinion of seven surgeons."
To what results the union of the two professions was liable to lead, may be seen by the example of a learned and famous person, who has left on record the product of his labors in the double capacity of clergyman and physician.
I have had the privilege of examining a manuscript of Cotton Mather's relating to medicine, by the kindness of the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, to which society it belongs. A brief notice of this curious document may prove not uninteresting.