We discuss colonial physicians in the Salem area and their role in shifting unexplained illness from a medical issue to a spiritual and legal crisis. On February 16, 1692, physician William Griggs Sr. bought a home and land in Salem Village for 71 pounds, where he lived with his wife and his niece Elizabeth Hubbard, who became afflicted on February 25. Griggs is widely believed to have diagnosed Betty Parris and Abigail Williams as being under an “evil hand,” though the source does not name the physician, leaving open the possibility another doctor made the diagnosis. We compare Salem to Boston’s medical scene, highlighting Dr. Thomas Oakes’s 1688 diagnosis of the Goodwin children as afflicted by “hellish witchcraft,” a precedent connected to the Goody Glover case. Finally, we describe remedies recorded from Salem physician Zerubabel Endicott’s papers, including dried stone horse liver for bloody flux and a childbirth prescription using a lock of a virgin’s hair.

00:00 Welcome to Salem Witch Trials Daily: Doctors Enter the Story

00:22 Feb 16, 1692: Dr. William Griggs Buys Land in Salem Village

00:56 Elizabeth Hubbard & the First Afflictions Begin

01:11 “Under an Evil Hand”: When Medicine Turns to Witchcraft

01:43 Colonial Medicine’s Power Families: Endicott & the Winthrops

02:27 Salem’s Medical Roster & the Swinnerton Family Web

03:33 Medicine in the Courtroom: Judge Gedney’s Drugs and Ointments

04:02 Was It Really Griggs? Doubts About the Famous Diagnosis

04:43 Boston’s Precedent: Dr. Thomas Oakes, the Goodwin Children & Goody Glover

05:55 What Did They Prescribe? Zerubabel Endicott’s Wild Remedies

07:50 From Horse Livers to “Evil Hands”: Why the Supernatural Won Out (Conclusion)

George Francis Dow: Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony

Sidney Perley: The History of Salem, Massachusetts

⁠Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

The Thing About Witch Hunts / About Salem YouTube channe

⁠Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub

Salem Witch Trials Daily Course Week 5: The Framework of Death

⁠The Thing About Salem

⁠The Thing About Witch Hunts

⁠Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience

⁠Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege

⁠Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Ben Wickey, More Weight: A Salem Story

Peabody Essex Museum Salem Witch Trials Collection:

The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689–1694 - Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Richard Hite, In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692: https://bookshop.org/a/90227/9781594164378