Re: (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050114.html)
In response to Cecil’s opinion regarding the unlikelihood that ergotism played a role in the Salem incident I’d like to share a quote from Dr. Linnda Caporael, the woman who originated the hypothesis. She concedes that ergot poisoning can’t explain all of the events at Salem and that some of the behaviors exhibited by the witch accusers probably were the result of mass hysteria – or outright fakery. “At the end of June and the beginning of July, 1692, I think there was more imagination than ergot. But by that point in time three people had already been hung, and the trials had taken a path that people felt they had to stay on,” Caporael says. “One of the clearest examples is the young accuser who, in the late summer, said ‘wait a minute, I don’t think that there are witches after all.’ At that point, the other girls began accusing HER of being a witch, and she immediately seemed to understand what was going on and began being a vociferous accuser again.”
While the evidence implicating ergotism remains, and will probably always remain circumstantial, the hypothesis does not deserve dismissal.
I read several books on Salem as an undergrad in the early 1980s when the ergotism theory was strongest. My take then was that it may have caused an initial seizure in one or two girls, but then the rest was political motivation by the folks in Salem town against the folks in Salem Village and perhaps some true hysteria. To me it seemed more likely that one of the original girls could have been simply epileptic, which is terrifying in and of itself if you’ve never witnessed a full fledged grande mal seizure (and most of the girls and many of the villagers were provincial in the most extreme meaning- they may well haven’t) in conjunction with food poisoning of some sort causing convulsions and the like among the others, thus leading to full fledged hysteria.
Or perhaps they were fornicating with the devil.
The last time the subject came up, my wife pointed out that the fact that ergot can be taken in transdermally – such as in kneading dough – offers possibilities.
I watched a show about this on the history channel this weekend. They said the most compelling evidence against ergot posioning is that the girls were only sporatically “ill.” And “ill” at the most convienient times too. Had it truely be ergot posioning, they wouldn’t have seemed to be fine a lot of the time like historical accounts suggest they often appeared to be.