om the witchcraft delusion." Dr. John Swinnerton--the same, by the
way, whose memory is illuminated by a ray from the genius of
Hawthorne--died the very year before the great witchcraft explosion took
place. But who can doubt that it was from him that the family had
learned to despise and to resist the base superstition; or that Bridget
Bishop, whose house he rented, as Mr. Upham tells me, the first person
hanged in the time of the delusion, would have found an efficient
protector in her tenant, had he been living, to head the opposition of
his family to the misguided clergymen and magistrates?

I cannot doubt that our early physicians brought with them many Old-World
medical superstitions, and I have no question that they were more or less
involved in the prevailing errors of the community in which they lived.
But, on the whole, their record is a clean one, so far as we can get at
it; and where it is questionable we must remember that there must have
been many little-educated persons among them; and that all must have
felt, to some extent, the influence of those sincere and devoted but
unsafe men, the physic-practising clergymen, who often used spiritual
means as a substitute for temporal ones, who looked upon a hysteric
patient as possessed by the devil, and treated a fractured skull by
prayers and plasters, following the advice of a ruling elder in
opposition to the "unanimous opinion of seven surgeons."

To what results the union of the two professions was liable to lead, may
be seen by the example of a learned and famous person, who has left on
record the product of his labors in the double capacity of clergyman and
physician.

I have had the privilege of examining a manuscript of Cotton Mather's
relating to medicine, by the kindness of the librarian of the American
Antiquarian Society, to which society it belongs. A brief notice of this
curious document may prove not uninteresting.

It is entitled "The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay upon the Common Maladies
of Mankind, offering, first, the sentiments of Piety," etc., etc., and "a
collection of plain but potent and Approved REMEDIES for the Maladies."
There are sixty-six "Capsula's," as he calls them, or chapters, in his
table of contents; of which, five--from the fifteenth to the nineteenth,
inclusive--are missing. This is a most unfortunate loss, as the
eighteenth capsula treated of agues, and we could have learned from it
something of their degree of frequency