hich, as I have been informed, is usual in such cases.
However, I forgive all the world, and therein all those that have done
me wrong." Another victim of the same "Bloody Assize" of Jeffreys,
Mrs. Gaunt, of Wapping, pathetically says: "I did but relieve an
unworthy, poor, distressed family, and lo, I must die!"

The age was the legatee of a spirit of venom and bigotry which
expressed itself in deeds of violence more distressing than those
incident to the religious wars. Deeds of blood, when connected with
the defence of convictions, have about them something of the heroic,
but there is absolutely no ray of glory to fall upon and lighten the
dreary records of the war upon defenceless women charged with being
witches, which broke out with fresh virulence with the increase of
religious fervor under the Commonwealth. The charges were many and
specious, but a very common form centred about the compassionate
functions of women as the ameliorators of human distress.

The history of witchcraft is so intimately associated with that of
medicine, that to write an account of the one involves a recital of
the other. The utter lack of knowledge of the anatomy of the human
body and its functions, which continued down to quite recent times,
accounts for the mystery and magic which surrounded the whole subject
of medicine, not only earlier than and during the period of which
we are speaking, but long subsequent to it. The one who could
successfully treat disease was regarded as in league with the powers
of darkness. Until the practice of medicine came to be established
upon scientific principles, the care of the sick largely devolved upon
women. Had it been men instead of women who performed the crude but
often sincere service of nurse and physician, they would have come
under the same ban with the effects of which the practitioners of the
other sex were visited. It is not probable, however, that the public
odium would have gone to such lengths of violence in its expression.

Among savage peoples, as the primitive tribes of Africa and the
American aborigines, the man who can dispel disease by a fetich--the
great medicine-man of a tribe--has always been regarded with a feeling
of combined jealousy, suspicion, and fear; but, because of the occult
powers he is supposed to control, fear predominates and passes into a
form of reverence. Not so, however, in the case of woman, of whom
we write; she was looked upon as having forfeited, to an