Near this site in
1692 five
men and eleven women, all accused of witchcraft, died by hanging;
another
man was pressed to death. These ignorant and cruel acts executed in the
name of religion, more recently have been attributed to the symptoms of
poisoning by ingestion of ergot. There is evidence from weather,
agricultural
practices, disease symptoms, and social conditions, all of which point
to a fungal cause for the bewitching. The plant pathogenic fungus, Claviceps
purpurea, infects rye and several other grasses. It produces a
resistant
sclerotium that grows in the ovary of the flowers of the developing
grain
heads. An early link between contaminated rye and outbreaks of a
terrifying
disease was made in 1676 by a French physician, Denis Dodart, but it
was
not until the suggestion of another European physician, John Stearns,
in
1807 that the ergot connection with the disease was followed up. In
ignorance
of this information one Salem magistrate hearing witchcraft cases
provided
excellent evidence on the weather conditions. He wrote in his diary
that
early rains and warm to hot weather occurred during the spring and
summer
of 1691; these are conditions favorable to growth of the fungus.
Although rye and other crops were sowed and grew under these
conditions,
they often were harvested and stored in barns for months before being
threshed
during cooler weather. Individuals with symptoms believed to be the
result
of bewitching were not affected until December 1691 and their
occurrence
ended abruptly in the late fall of 1692, probably when that batch of
rye
ran out. The ending of witchcraft outbreaks was likely due, not to
execution
of witches, but to the fact that there was a drought in 1692 with
conditions
unfavorable for fungal infection and growth. Symptoms of bewitchment
consisted
of convulsions, hallucinations, manic melancholia, psychosis, delirium,
crawling sensations of the skin, vertigo, headaches, vomiting and
diarrhea,
all symptomsassociated with the ingestion of ergotized rye. This
episode
left almost two hundred people arrested and twenty, mostly executed
during
less that a year until the occurrence of the drought. --R. Mancini
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