Ergotism: The Salem Witch Trials

Elvira Paredes

Prof. Cavazos

HIST-17A

3 October 2016

Caporael, Linnda R. Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem? Jstor, Jan 2004. Web.

        Most events in history have a colorful amount of causes or factors that led up for it to happen. For the Salem Witch Trials, something as small as a grain is defined as one of the causes by Caporel in her scholarly article. Ergotism, which is derived from the ergot plant that was mostly supplemented for rye bread, was a possible threat and cause to make the group of young girls in Salem ‘afflicted’ and make the village people jump to conclusions without even thinking about what could have really happened.

        Caporael mentions not only how this grain had it’s sight affects after being eaten by an animal or human, but many other drawn conclusions that can identify as factors for these trials. Caporael stated, “Outright fraud, political factionalism, Freudiam psychodynamics, sensation seeking, clinical hysteria, even the existence of witchcraft itself, have been proposed as explanatory devises” (22). Tibuta, the famous native slave, had a couple of mentions in the article as well, and was said in being one of the causes as well. For the ergot plant, there is scientific evidence that it can display some symptoms. For example, “ …crawling sensations in the skin, tingling in the fingers, vertigo, tinnitus aurium, headaches, disturbances in sensation, hallucination, painful muscular contractions leading to epileptiform convulsions, vomiting, and diarrhea…all of these symptoms are alluded to in the Salem witchcraft records” (23). As shown within the quote, most accused women had some if not a combination of the symptoms listed. This comes to show that it could be some type of food poisoning instead of a Native American’s ‘black magic’. The author is very clear and strong when switching from topic to topic within the writing, but a more in-depth analysis on ergotism would have been helpful to ensure the maximum outcome of information on this cause for the readers. For primary sources, older documents, books, charts, and maps were utilized to help further support the author’s thesis on how ergotism was quite a reasonable reason to point the finger to due to Salem’s location and growing conditions.