Chadwick Hansen and clinical hysteria

Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (New York, 1969)

OK, I for one can't decide whether I love or hate this guy. He gives an excellent explanation of the onset of the girls fits as due to clinical hysteria (it's actually really really fascinating!), and says it was the penultimate result of their fear of witchcraft

BUT

His theory is that witches really were practising witchcraft in Salem....

OK, Hansen, whatever floats your boat.

He tells us that if the existing documents are read correctly, then they show us that people like Bridget Bishop, Candy, and Mammy Redd actually were practicing black magic... with success.

His argument is thorough...but unconvincing, so i'll ignore it, HOWEVER, I'd like to look at his explanations of clinical hysteria. He takes his information from Dr. Walter B. Cannon of Harvard Medical School, who in 1942 published an article entitled "Voodoo Death". Cannon's thesis was then tested in the Psychobiological Laboratory at John Hopkins Medical School by Curt P. Richter, who then published his findings in 1957 titled "On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man".

The main point is, that people who thought they were bewitched convinced themselves of it so completely that they developed the symptoms associated with it. Nowadays, these kinds of diseases are known as psychosomatic.

Richter was using rats (obviously) to try and test the survival times of domestic vs. wild rats that were placed in water-filled beakers to swim until they drowned. His results were so irregular, that he set out to discover the cause of death. He discovered that the cause of death was, put simply, hopelessness. The rats were so convinced that there was no chance of escape from the water, that their bodies just shut-down. Richter then went on to train rats by rescuing them repeatedly from the water, and they same for longer and longer. He also discovered that if he rescued rats that were about to die a psychogenic death, they recovered rapidly.

Now if we place this theory into the context of the Salem witch trials, isn't it possible that the girls were so convinced of their bewitchment, both by their fear of it, and by their diagnosis by a physician, that they then developed the symptoms they associated with it? Similarly, the idea of rats recovering after being rescued could work the same way with a counter charm used for witchcraft victims. They believe they have been cured of their bewitchment, and so they recover.

I don't really know why I just wasted half a lesson on this, I just thought it was interesting. If anything it shows that as we move into more modern times more emphasis is being placed on psychological disorders. I'm a big fan of the mental illness, but the only problem with this is 'how do you prove what the mental state of people who have been dead for over 300 years was?'