For Halloween today we have two blog posts. A recipe against witchcraft from our archives and a survey of some of the writing about witches and witch-hunts that we have in the RCP library. If you’re keen for more on the spookiest time of year, there’s also last year’s post about the dance of death.
From wise-women of the early modern era, via the witch-hunts of the inquisition, to the dawning of a more scientific approach to diagnosis and disease management, the RCP library collections inform us about the supernatural beliefs, political manoeuvring, and religious fanaticism that led to the death by burning of about 500,000 people – 85% of them women – between 1400 and 1700.
In Women and the practice of medical care in early modern Europe, 1400-1800, Leigh Whaley discusses the medieval role of the wise-woman, midwife and healer: a role that became discredited and conflated with the demonized figure of the witch in the early modern era. Whaley argues that this was part of a movement in which ‘a number of strategies were taken to eliminate women and other “popular” healers from the medical “profession.”’ The introduction of licensing and university education (for men only) was also part of a move from local healers to state sanctioned practitioners. The ‘Act for the Appointing of Physicians and Surgeons’ of 1684 condemned unlicensed practitioners of medicine as those ‘who try to cure with the use of sorcery and witchcraft…to the high displeasure of God, …most especially of them that cannot discern the uncunning from the cunning.’
In The medical man and the witch during the Renaissance, Gregory Zilboorg outlines the terrifying hypothesis of the malleus maleficarum, or ‘hammer of witches’. This was published sometime between 1487 and 1489, and led to a new era of persecution by religious forces of people accused of witchcraft, sorcery or heresy. The treatise is in three parts. The first argues that he who does not believe in the existence of witches is either wrong or a heretic themselves. The second part describes the different types of witches and methods used to identify a witch. The third part deals with the legal forms of examining and sentencing a witch. Some of the chilling headings in the second part include:
Of the way whereby a formal pact with evil is made; Here follows the way whereby witches copulate with those devils known as Incubi; How witch midwives commit most horrid crimes when they either kill children or offer them to devils in most accursed wise; How they raise and stir up hailstorms and tempests, and cause lightening to blast both men and beasts.
In other words, witches and former wise women were responsible for almost anything that might go wrong in medieval life.
In Witchcraft and hysteria in Elizabethan London, Michael MacDonald discusses the contribution of RCP fellow Edward Jordan to the cause of scientific progress against superstition and the supernatural interpretation of disease. In his 1603 publication, Briefe discourse of a disease called the suffocation of the mother, Jordan introduces the clinical concept of hysteria. The main thrust of the treatise is an examination of the case of Mary Glover, who in a famous case in 1602 was allegedly bewitched by a London shopkeeper, Elizabeth Jackson. Elizabeth was found guilty at an infamous trial which presented conflicting evidence from a range of eminent physicians of the time, including John Argent, who was later president of the college eight times.
The RCP library contains print and electronic resources on the history of medicine, genealogy and health and social policy and well as some subjects – like witchcraft – that you might not expect. It is open to all, Monday to Friday, and the catalogue is available online.
Claire Sexton, collections development librarian
The books mentioned in this post are:
- Leigh Whaley, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
- Gregory Zilboorg, The medical man and the witch during the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935)
- Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover case (London: Routledge, 1991).
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