into a madhouse?

The miserable delusion of witchcraft illustrates, in a still more
impressive way, the false ideas which governed the supposed relation of
men with the spiritual world. I have no doubt many physicians shared in
these superstitions. Mr. Upham says they--that is, some of them--were
in the habit of attributing their want of success to the fact, that an
"evil hand" was on their patient. The temptation was strong, no doubt,
when magistrates and ministers and all that followed their lead were
contented with such an explanation. But how was it in Salem, according
to Mr. Upham's own statement? Dr. John Swinnerton was, he says, for
many years the principal physician of Salem. And he says, also, "The
Swinnerton family were all along opposed to Mr. Parris, and kept
remarkably clear from 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.