The roots of witchcraft can be traced back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, where the lines between religion, magic, and medicine were often blurred.^1,2 Many healers combined herbal knowledge with rituals, charms, amulets, and incantations, and some were particularly proficient in using plants to cure illnesses, alleviate pain, or induce sleep (as in “Sleeping Beauty”, “Snow White”, and Romeo and Juliet). They used extracts of foxglove, serpentine, or dry frogs. They also prescribed love potions containing mandrake oil (a source of hyoscyamine and atropine), and areca nut (a strong stimulant and cause of euphoria).

Quite early on some healers came to be regarded as sorcerers even before the advent of widespread Christianity. Under the reign of Augustus, some 2,000 books were burned for being magical; under Tiberius and Claudius a few men and women were brought to trial for practicing sorcery. In the following centuries the number of executions began to rise. The period 1300–1330 is the most likely date when the Church began to seriously view some women healers as dangerously heretical and associate them with the devil. By 1435–50, trials and executions had become much more frequent.

In 1374 Pope Gregory XI declared that all magic was done with the aid of demons and therefore was grounds for prosecution of heresy. Witch trials continued through the 14th and early 15th centuries and intermittently for another 300 years. Between 1500 and 1660, Europe saw between 50,000 and 80,000 suspected witches executed. About 80% of those killed were women, mainly elderly and poor, who were burned, hanged, or tortured. This occurred most frequently in Germany, followed next by France and England. In colonial Salem, Massachusetts, more than two hundred people were accused of practicing black magic and nineteen were convicted and hanged, including some for having symptoms now believed to have been due to ergotism (1692–1693).

History is replete with accounts of how those suspected of witchcraft were treated. Often stripped naked, they were carefully examined for devil marks such as having warts with no pain and no bleeding when a needle was thrust through them, or having fleshy pedunculated papillomata pronounced as “teats” for spirits to suck from. Women were disproportionately targeted because of their roles as caregivers and healers, and because of their knowledge of plants and natural remedies. Midwives were also considered a threat to the supremacy of the Church and sometimes of that of male physicians. The fear of the unknown, coupled with the patriarchal structures of the times, led to the belief by some that these women were more susceptible to the devil’s temptations and must have acquired their knowledge by supernatural means.

A surprising number of theories have been advanced to account for most of the medieval witch hunts that took place in Europe and North America. Ten theories have been summarized by Professor Pavlac as follows:³

1. The Illness Theories: These are attributed to groups of people, especially peasants, going after witches while themselves suffering from mass hysteria, clinical psychoses, syphilis, ergotism, or from consuming bad mushrooms and herbs such as deadly nightshade or henbane.
2. The Geographic Origins Theories: The Witch Hunts originated in specific locations, for example first in the mountainous regions of the Alps and Pyrenees that had been self-sufficient in the past but may have been suddenly caught in new competition because of the economic revolution.
3. The Disaster Theory: As actual misfortunes struck (plague, famine, war, storms), people blamed supernatural forces and found scapegoats in witches.
4. The Greed Theory: Elites initiated the hunts in order to confiscate the property of others.
5. The Conspiracy Theory: religious elites linked heresy and witches to an imagined organized sect that was a danger to Christianity. Some authorities sincerely believed in a Satanic threat, even though it did not really exist.
6. The Religious Rebellion Theories: Some authorities believed that devil worship constituted a subversive attack on the ruling Christian order, or that certain forms of worship from the ancient world continued and were interpreted by the Christian hunters as Satanic.
7. The Confessional Conflict Theory: The Reformation and its resultant fights between Protestants (mainly Lutherans, Calvinists and Anabaptists, as well as Anglicans) and Roman Catholics led each to use witchcraft to attack one another.
8. The Social Control or State-building Theory: Early modern governments exploited the fear of witchcraft in order to centralize authority, increase bureaucratic jurisdiction, impose cultural uniformity, and dominate the Church.
9. The Social Functionalist or Social Accusations Theory: Witch accusers acted on a psychological need to blame others for their own personal problems.
10. The Misogyny Theory: The witch hunts embodied a social hostility toward women.

Missing from these explanations are more recent publications and perspectives that have also attempted to account for the events that occurred in Europe between 1400 and 1800. The literature on witchcraft is enormous.¹ It has been suggested that the doctors themselves helped spark the persecutions when the advent of early medieval science and the overthrow of the beliefs in Galenic medicine left them confused about what to believe.⁴ We were likewise reminded that doctors frequently deal with the “ignorant and backward” patients, that “man is even less of a creature of reason then we had thought,” ⁵ and that most witchcraft trials in western Europe were conducted by judges who were deeply committed to the Christian doctrine. Many doctors, such as Sir Thomas Brown of Norwich in the second half of the 17th century, believed in witches. They also credulously adopted remedies that were worse than the diseases they were expected to cure. Indeed, the horrible events of the mid-20th century should serve as a warning to doctors and scientists that such malignant ideologies must never be allowed to prosper.

Further reading

1. Deetjen C. Witchcraft and medicine. Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, May 1934, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 164-175.
2. Llanes LC, Sa NB, Cenci AR et al. Witches, Potions, and Metabolites: an overview from a medicinal perspective. RSC Medicinal Chemistry 2022 Apr 20; 13(4): 405–412.
3. Pavlac, Brian A. “Ten Theories about the Origins of the Witch Hunts,” Prof. Pavlac’s Witch Hunts Page. (9 August 2017). brianpavlac.org/witchhunts/wtheories.html
4. Estes LL. The Medical Origins of the European Witch Craze. Journal of Social History 1983: 17, No 2:284, Winter 1983.
5. Nova et Vetera: Witchcraft. BMJ Dec 30, 1922.