The crisis known as the Salem witch trials was a small-scale tragedy compared to the large Scottish and English witch-hunts of the seventeenth century. But it was the worst witch-hunt in American history. It lasted over a year, spreading to over twenty-five different communities. More than 150 people were arrested, and nineteen were executed by hanging. In mid-February 1692, when strange afflictions were happening to two young girls in the house of the village minister, a doctor named William Griggs diagnosed the “Evil Hand” as the cause. It was this diagnosis that helped start the Salem witch trials. There is little historical information about Dr. Griggs, but what little there is, is significant. Also important are historians’ assessments of his medical competence and moral character.
The Reverend John Hale wrote the only eye-witness account of the circumstances that led to Griggs’s diagnosis: “Mr. Samuel Paris, Pastor of the Church in Salem-Village, had a Daughter of Nine, and a Neice of about Eleven years of Age, sadly Afflicted of they knew not what Distempers; and he made his application to Physitians, yet still they grew worse: And at length one Physitian gave his opinion that the cause was the Evil Hand,” namely, the devil. Hale did not name the doctor who gave the diagnosis, but historians agree that it was seventy-year-old Dr. William Griggs, who had recently moved to Salem Village and become its first resident doctor.
Hale’s account implies that the other doctors involved not only examined the children but also attempted to treat their afflictions, and perhaps Griggs did as well. The doctors likely consulted their medical books for symptoms that aligned with what they saw. Griggs himself owned nine medical books and a grinding stone used to mix herbal remedies. Seventeenth-century medical books offered herbal treatments and tinctures for symptoms such as paralysis, apoplexy, and hysteria, which might have appeared to resemble those of the afflicted children. The Reverend Cotton Mather’s book, The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay Upon the Common Maladies of Mankind (1724), presents the following remedy for female fits and hysterical convulsions: “Take the Seeds of Parsnip in Wine, or in proper Water. Take twelve Drops of the Spirit Soot; (or, of [dried human] Blood, or of Harts-horn,) twice a day in an Appropriate Vehicle. This [is] also proposed as, An Excellent Tincture for Hysteric Convulsions. Take of Assa-foetida, or Galbanum, two Ounces; Dissolve them in Spirit of Wine, till a Red Tincture is Extracted. A Scruple of this, is to be taken in two or three Spoonfuls of Mugwort-Water.”