cause sickness. In an
age when weapon salve was wiped on the weapon and not the wound, and
when astrology was intimately associated with the practice of medicine,
it is not surprising to find, also, the witch and her power to cause
disease. Goodwife Wright stood accused of such powers in the colony's
general court on September 11, 1626.

Goodwife Wright had caused, according to her accusers, the illness of a
husband, wife, and child out of a spirit of revenge; and she was able
to prophesy deaths as well. The details of the case brought against
this woman accused of witchcraft reveal the more bizarre medical
practices of the time. Goodwife Wright expected to serve as the midwife
but the expectant mother refused to employ her upon learning that
Wright was left-handed. Soon after affronting Wright in such a manner,
the mother complained that her breast "grew dangerouslie sore" and her
husband and child both fell sick within a few weeks. With
circumstantial evidence of this kind, suspicion had little difficulty
in linking the midwife with the sicknesses.

Testimony revealed that on another occasion she had used her powers to
counter the actions of another suspected witch. Having been informed
that the other witch was causing the sickness, Wright had the ill
person throw a red-hot horseshoe into her own urine. The result,
according to witnesses was that the offending witch was "sick at harte"
as long as the horseshoe was hot, and the sick person well when it had
cooled.

CHURCHMEN AND MEDICINE

Medicine was associated in many minds not only with the powers of evil
but also with the forces for good. The clergyman in colonial America
often practiced medicine, and the layman in some localities of Virginia
could turn to the local parson for medical assistance.

Throughout the early Christian era and the medieval period, medicine
and religion had had a close relationship. The New Testament had
numerous references to the healing of the sick by spiritual means, and
a casual relationship between sin and physical affliction had been
assumed by many persons for centuries before the seventeenth. The hand
of God was still seen by many in physical phenomena, whether disease or
the flight of a comet. Not only was there a supernatural relationship
seen between the God of the church and disease, but also a natural one
between medicine and the church clergy, for they had staffed the
medical schools for centuries. It is not surprising