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.

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.