Medicine, healing, and the Devil
amulets prescribed by Georg Bartisch in 1583
to protect against occult causes of eye disease
As historians have moved away from a focus on "great men and great ideas" in the history of medicine, towards an attempt to understand the world of patients and ordinary practitioners, it has begun to be possible to see both the resort to cunning folk and the use of various forms of religious healing as resources which patients could use alongside academic medicine. Sometimes, the providers of such resources were in competition or were nakedly hostile to one another for ideological reasons. On other occasions, they might well work together very comfortably. Thus, to see Edward Jorden as a hero of modern medicine, battling against superstition, is to overlook both his alliance with the Bishop of London and the presence of other medical practitioners on the Puritan side of the argument.
Cunning folk have generally been neglected, as Willem de Blécourt has pointed out. He examines these specialists in counter-witchcraft and other ailments, and uses court evidence to dispute the widely held assertion that this group were themselves smeared by prosecutions against witches. Using evidence from witchcraft trials in the Netherlands and northern Europe, he constructs a positive view of soothsayers, witch doctors, and priests-physicians, stressing that they were a group who were attractive to their clients, were often found in cities and not a rural relic, and that there were widespread geographical and gender balance differences among these counter-witchcraft practitioners. His conclusion is that, rather than the usual view from the supply side, demand for their services should provide a more useful basis for research and analysis of the role of cunning folk.
Cunning folk, whether educated or not, did not necessarily
specialize in treating bewitchment, but they were usually ready for such
cases. In a manuscript of the Elizabethan astrologer and unlicensed
physician, Simon Forman, we read his remedies:
"When any
body is bewitched, you shall do thus. Let one watch the witch or
partie suspected doe goe into her house and presently before any body goe
in after her let one pull a handfull of the thatch over the door or take
a tylle from over the doore of the witch, and put it in the fire and burn
it settinge a paire of brandyrons over it... Or els take 2 horseshoes and
heate them hote in the fiere and naile one of them at the threshold of
the doore and quentch the other in the Vrine of the partie bewitched and
set the Vrine over the fiere, and the horseshoe in it and set a trenate
over it, and make the Vrine boyle, till it consume, and so shall the witch
be punished, but keepe her out, and let her not come in.
"Or ells take
the smocke or the shirte of the partie bewitched and dipe him [i.e. it]
well in his Vrine, then put him [i.e. it] in the fier and witch undoubtely
will come and be so tormented exceedingly."
It is clear that such informal measures could lead to
a peaceable outcome to witchcraft suspicions, providing at least a temporary
settlement of the problem, but equally they could fuel hostility by fixing
suspicion on a particular individual.
Ronald Sawyer's examination of the witchcraft caseload of Richard Napier, an astrological priest-physician who was also the subject of Michael MacDonald's Mystical Bedlam, helps to flesh out our understanding of this kind of therapy. People suffering bodily or mental ailments in seventeenth-century England sought treatment from a variety of healers, generally showing neither blind loyalty to any one theory or cosmology nor concern that the various theories were contradictory. They took responsibility for accepting or rejecting advice, and demanded to participate in implementing any therapy. Witchcraft was considered a possible cause of certain patterns and kinds of ailments by most kinds of healers, and was often adopted after other explanations had failed. Accusations of witchcraft were rarely abstract, but grounded in the immediate social relations of the accuser and accused. The treatments often included direct interaction between the patient and the accused. Here we see the kinds of witchcraft-related problems that never reached the criminal courts, but were dealt with locally and informally. Napier used the full range of neo-Platonist techniques - judicial astrology, alchemy, amulets, and even angelic consultations - to help him treat his extensive clientele, arousing great anger among local Puritan physicians and clergy. Even the anti-Puritan bishop of the diocese was moved to denounce the dual vocation of the priest-physicians, in a visitation sermon.
In some respects, the revival of interest in Platonic thought that resulted from the work of the late fifteenth-century priest-physician Marsilio Ficino made possible a greater medical role for occult and demonic causation. In Paris, Jean Fernel gave considerable attention to occult causes and cures for disease. This included many purely natural phenomena, the manner of working was occult, or hidden, such as poisons and contagions. However, it could also include magic and witchcraft. Many sixteenth-century physicians and surgeons devoted space in their works to the consideration of such matters. One of the major concerns of medicine and natural philosophy became the definition of what was natural and what was not, as in the investigation of monsters. Although an older generation of historians was quick to condemn early modern physicians for diagnosing bewitchment, as if this were merely an admission of ignorance, it makes more sense to see such diagnoses as springing from definitions of what phenomena were beyond the nature. Divisions between the natural and the preternatural shifted over time, but their existence was a major feature of many intellectual pursuits.
Leland Estes suggested that this development of a distinction between the natural and the preternatural was partly responsible for witch-hunting, which seems a little too strong, although it certainly contributed to the character of much of the debate. Neither during the rise of prosecutions nor during the decline were the medical professions anywhere near as influential as church and state. At best, they offered arguments that could be used by advocates or opponents of witch-hunting, and they contributed to the scepticism of both demonologists and their critics. Physicians took a wide variety of positions, although few were as prominent as Weyer. In England, the works of Ady and Webster, both of them provincial licensed (rather than graduate) practitioners in counties notorious for witch trials, contributed to the decline of prosecution in the late seventeenth century, as did the work of the more established Thomas Willis, on the anatomy and disorders of the brain. However, at the height of the trials, the existence of witches was not an issue. What concerned physicians was how to determine what might properly be ascribed to the activities of the Devil or his minions. In each country, the relationship between medicine and religion was different, as a result of local issues.
Georg
Bartisch's Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst (1583) is a remarkable
illustrated work on eye surgery, intended for both medical and lay readers.
The acclaim for his work was such that, in 1588, Bartisch was assigned
court oculist to August I, Elector of Saxony, and he continued working
in Dresden until his death in about 1607. He attributed several eye
diseases to the effects of witchcraft, including the one shown here.
The amulets which he prescribed were mainly of a religious character, and
similar objects were to be found throughout Europe, being used as popular
means of warding off evil and illness. Protestant physicians and
clerics were fond of dissecting such objects when they encountered them,
much to the chagrin of the indignant owners.
However,
some Protestant physicians also employed amulets, especially if they were
influenced by neo-Platonism or the chemical philosophy of Paracelsus, as
we have seen in the case of Napier. The explanation offered was usually
in terms of sympathies, but their more orthodox colleagues saw this as
either delusory or as a covert use of demonic forces. Daniel Sennert
of Wittenberg attacked Paracelsianism strongly on this point and John Cotta,
a Puritan physician in Northampton, was as concerned to attack alchemical
and astrological priest-physicians such as Richard Napier for their use
of amulets and magical remedies as he was to attack more humble cunning
folk. Nevertheless, physicians and natural philosophers continued
to attempt to find a natural explanation. Robert Boyle suggested
that the solution might be found in atoms passing imperceptibly from amulet
to patient. Yet more problematic was the weapon-salve, whereby a
wound might be treated indirectly, through remedies applied to the instrument
which caused the wound. We might see this as a salutory non-intervention
by comparison with more conventional treatments, but Paracelsus, Robert
Fludd and Jan Baptist van Helmont were all attacked for their belief in
this apparently magical form of cure. Many of the methods employed
by Paracelsians seemed suspect to their orthodox competitors.
Physicians and midwives were frequently called upon to act in their professional capacities during investigations and trials for witchcraft. Midwives might be called upon to search the body of a suspected witch for the witch's mark or for the teat at which the Devil or the witch's familiars were believed to suckle, in some countries. They would also be called upon to decide if a condemned witch was pregnant. Physicians had often a rather more substantial role.
Frequently, one finds traces of medical practitioners being involved in possible cases of bewitchment long before the magistrates were informed. Their expert opinion, that an affliction was beyond the normal range of diseases, might well be influential in determining the decision to press for a witchcraft prosecution. However, learned physicians were often far more reluctant to take such a step than were their non-graduate colleagues, let alone the cunning men who might be consulted in such cases. Physicians might also be called in by investigating magistrates, even after a decision on the character of the case had been taken, in order to help relieve the symptoms. They might then be asked to appear in court, to give an opinion on the nature of the affliction, and in some cases they were bitterly divided on this issue. In the most notorious cases, such divisions could be highly politicized.
Demonic possession, and the more spectacular cases of bewitchment, attracted especial attention from physicians, because it was clearly crucial to distinguish between four possible diagnoses of the phenomena. Two were preternatural - bewitchment and direct possession - and two were natural - disease and fraud. In any given situation, two or more of these might well be thought to combine.
During the period of the French Wars of Religion, a series of spectacular exorcisms was carried out before thousands of witnesses. The goal of the Catholic priests was to promote the reconversion of the Huguenots to Catholicism by demonstrating the power of the sacraments and sacramentals over the Devil. The French demonologists who wrote after Jean Bodin had similar motives. The politics of the Catholic League and the religious fanaticism of the dévots were not only opposed by Protestants but also by the Crown and the politiques, who had no desire to see the country racked by religious strife or the state subordinate to papal interests. In 1598, the French demoniac Marthe Brossier accused her neighbor Anne Chevreau of causing her demonic possession by witchcraft. Walker and Dickerman analyze the testimony of Anne Chevreau and trace the incident through to its conclusion in Rome. Marthe was the third of four sisters whose father could not provide for their marriages. Evidence suggests that Marthe focused attention on herself by means of her accusations against Anne in an effort to escape the limitations of her situation. Marthe's exorcisms also contained anti-Huguenot propaganda.
Henri IV ordered the physician Michael Marescot and a group of medical colleagues to investigate the popular claims to demonic possession of Marthe in the expectation that they could establish that her "possession" was either a mis-diagnosis of a natural disease such as epilepsy or hysteria, or that they could prove it to be a deliberate fraud. Marescot's Discours veritable sur le faict de Marthe Brossier de Romorantin pretendue demoniaque appeared in 1599, and was translated immediately into English. Marescot's opinion was, "Nothing from the devil, much counterfeit, a little from disease." Marescot and his colleagues were participating in a political struggle, both within the French body politic and within Paris medicine. Henri IV, who had only converted to Catholicism in order to hold the throne, had surrounded himself with royal physicians who were Huguenots, openly or covertly, who were educated at Montpelier rather than the University of Paris, and who were Paracelsians or followers of Jean Fernel, rather than being orthodox Galenists. Without totally denying the possibility of demonic possession, Marescot and his colleagues established to their own satisfaction and that of the King that, in one of the most celebrated cases of "possession," a deluded and unbalanced woman had been exploited by her family and by a group of Catholic clergy, for financial gain and for the seditious purpose of stirring up anti-Huguenot sentiment. Interestingly, she appears to have made an accusation of witchcraft in the first instance, but this rapidly disappeared under the diagnosis of direct possession, which was more useful for propagandistic purposes.
Marescot tackled the traditional diagnostic signs used to distinguish what possessed persons, or rather the demons within them, were supposed to be able to do: to understand and speak languages of which the person had no prior knowledge; to discern secrets and predict events of which the person could have no natural knowledge; abnormal bodily strength and insensitivity to pain; revulsion at holy things, especially the reading of scripture or contact with the Host, holy water or other sacred objects. According to Marescot, Marthe Brossier could understand neither Latin nor Greek, as the exorcists had claimed; she had no reaction to holy water that was passed off as ordinary water, but that she convulsed when she was given plain water that she was told had been blessed; she showed no special clairvoyant powers; when she was read passages from the Aeneid, expecting them to be biblical passages, she showed dramatic signs of disturbance; although Marthe could withstand the pain of the "deep pricking of long pins" in her hands and neck without showing discomfort during her fits, Marescot did find her responsive to normal sources of pain when not in convulsions. Marescot diagnosed her insensitivity as the product of disease. The medical triumphalist or rationalist view of Marescot's intervention, incautiously adopted by D.P.Walker in his book, Unclean Spirits, would stress his "progressive thought" by carefully eliminating the positioned nature of his opinions.
In the Mary Glover case, which has been studied by Michael MacDonald, the London physicians and clergy were equally divided, although the lines of division were between Puritans and more moderate Calvinists. The Bishop of London's chaplain, Samuel Harsnet, had been publishing against both the Puritan minister John Darrel, who was very publicly going round the country dispossessing supposed demoniacs by prayer and fasting, and the Catholic exorcists who were similarly engaged although a little more covertly. The spectacular bewitchment of a pious London citizen's daughter attracted a great deal of attention, with major attempts being mounted to cast out the demon that was obsessing her. However, contrary to what every historian who has mentioned this case has said, there was virtually no mention of the possibility of her being possessed. This was because her social status and piety were conspicuously greater than those of the elderly charwoman whom she accused. Had she been diagnosed as possessed, no court case would have occurred, both because she could not appear as a witness and because the involvement of a witch would become questionable. When the case came to court, there were medical witnesses who asserted that she was bewitched and medical witnesses who asserted that she was suffering from a natural disease, "the suffocation of the mother" or hysteria. The judge took a strongly anti-witchcraft line and demanded to know what were the causes of this disease and how it might be cured. The medical witnesses appear to have equivocated somewhat, and the witch was condemned to be imprisoned, fined and pilloried. (This was under the Elizabethan witchcraft statute.)
Edward Jorden, one of the discomforted doubters, published A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother. Written upon occasions which hath been of late taken therby, to suspect possession of an evil spirit, or some such like supernatural power. Wherein it is declared that diverse strange actions and passions of the body of man, which in the common opinion are imputed to the Divell, have their true natural causes, and do accompany this disease (1603). In this work, Jordan identified almost all of those symptoms that had been traditionally identified with both demonic possession and bewitchment - insensibility, convulsions, and fits brought on by the presence of particular persons or artifacts - with symptoms of hysteria. Although Jorden's work disappeared without trace at the time, being rediscovered as a "forerunner of modern psychiatry" only in the twentieth century, Jorden himself became an advisor to James I on cases of supposed bewitchment and possession. With the political defeat of Puritanism at the Hampton Court Conference, the moderates gained in influence and scepticism about witchcraft and possession increased in the London medical profession. William Harvey, as royal physician to Charles I, presided over a committee of surgeons and midwives that investigated some condemned witches brought down from Lancashire. They found nothing out of the ordinary, in the way of marks that might be attributed to the Devil.
Although there was a resurgence of witchcraft prosecutions in England during the 1640s and 1650s, medical men had little to do with the cases and those who expressed an opinion were generally sceptical, as was Thomas Ady in the Essex cases. In 1662, Thomas Browne did tentatively support a diagnosis of bewitchment in the case of the Lowestoft witches, heard before Sir Matthew Hale at Bury St. Edmunds, but such a position was unusual by then. Only relatively obscure practitioners seem to have been involved in witchcraft cases to any significant extent. The most substantial work by an English medical practitioner on the subject was John Webster's Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, which attacked the trials and the associated beliefs from the standpoint of Helmontian medical materialism. His book was refused a licence by the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the grounds that his material view of angels was heretical, so he had to send it to the Royal Society for licensing. He was much criticized by some of the philosophers associated with the Royal Society, such as Henry More and Joseph Glanvill, who sought to use the reality of spiritual phenomena, including witches and poltergeists, as a buttress for religion against atheism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
several relevant essays in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland and Hans de Waardt (London, 1997)
David Gentilcore, "The church, the devil and the healing activities of living saints in the Kingdom of Naples after the Council of Trent", in Medicine and the Reformation (London, 1993) 134-155
David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch : the system of the sacred in early modern Terra d'Otranto (Manchester, 1992)
Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night (Charlottesville, 1998)
David Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy (Manchester, 1998)
Anita M. Walker and Edmund H. Dickerman, " 'A woman under the influence": A case of alleged possession in sixteenth-century France", Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991) 535-554 D 1.S5
Willem de Blécourt, "Witch doctors, soothsayers and priests. On cunning folk in European historiography and tradition", Social History 19 (1994)
Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (1981)
Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jordan and the Mary Glover Case (London, 1991)
Ronald C. Sawyer, " 'Strangely handled in all her lyms': witchcraft and healing in Jacobean England", Journal of Social History 22 (1989)
David Harley, "Mental illness, magical medicine and the Devil in northern England", in R. French & A. Wear, eds., The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1989)
Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, "Whose Enlightenment? : medicine, witchcraft, melancholia and pathology", in R.Porter, ed., Medicine in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam, 1995) 113-127
Russell Zguta, "Witchcraft and medicine in pre-Petrine Russia", Russian Review 37 (1978) 438-448
Leland L. Estes, "The medical origins of the European witch craze: A hypothesis", Journal of Social History 17 (1983) 271-284
Guido Ruggiero, "The Strange Death of Margarita Marcellini: Male, Signs, and the Everyday World of Pre-Modern Medicine", American Historical Review 106 (2001)
Norman Gevitz, " 'The devil hath laughed at the physicians': witchcraft and medical practice in seventeenth-century New England", Journal of the History of Medicine 55 (2000) 5-36 [PDF file]
Owen Davies, "Cunning folk in the medical marketplace during the nineteenth century", Medical History 43 (1999) 55-73
Jane P. Davidson, "The myth of the persecuted female healer", Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 14 (1993) 115-129
Garfield Tourney, "The physician and witchcraft in Restoration England", Medical History 16 (1972) 143-155
Thomas Harmon Jobe, "The Devil in Restoration science: the Glanvill-Webster witchcraft debate", Isis 72 (1981) 343-356
