Diagnosing Witchery: Early Modern Medical Discourses, Public Health, and the Gendered Body in the Seventeenth Century English Witch-Panics

Abstract

This research examines the nexus of witchcraft and early modern healthcare. It draws on witchcraft studies and history of medicine to frame witchcraft as a public health crisis originating in, and investigated through, misogynistic medical ideologies. This research began primarily as an attempt to answer lingering questions of gender discrepancy in predominance of female executions. By examining the witch-panics of the 1640s through early modern medical discourses, this thesis contributes to understanding the physiological origins of witchcraft. Its findings provide the intersection of medical history and the gendered body as a cohesive framework for the dominant discourses in early modern English witchcraft scholarship. It engages with traditional historiographical narratives of witchcraft largely dominated by socio-economic and gender dynamics of daily life in a tumultuous period of English history. It utilizes sources from medical literature, witchcraft treatises, pamphlet testimony records, statistical data, as well as the diaries and reports of early modern contemporaries. The study demonstrates the witch-panics possessed an emphatically environmental dimension. This consisted of century-long concerns over public health instigated by humanity’s sins: worsening mortality crises, rampant endemic diseases, violent religious conflicts, and crop failures. These disasters implicated human sin at the root of these catastrophes. By interrogating the physiological weaknesses characterizing the female body, this work situates witches as covert carriers of sin and harbingers of illness. This understanding shaped all levels of English witchcraft investigation within notions of public health and disease. Witchcraft is examined vis-à-vis burgeoning English public health discourses, the medicalized misogyny informing the witch-figure in popular European culture, and the investigative and protective roles of the body in East Anglian witch investigations.