Is this the real cause of the Salem Witch trials?
http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/history/ergot.htm
It seems so...
Linnda Caporael may have solved one of the biggest mysteries of early American history — the cause of the Salem Witch Trials — but she stumbled onto the case quite by accident. "I actually started this project as a senior in college," recalls Caporael, now a behavioral scientist and full professor at Photo of Linnda Caporael Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. "I had one of those standard senior problems where you are going for graduation check-out and find you are missing a critical course. Mine was a history course. I enrolled in one, and had to immediately write a paper, which I decided to do on Anne Putnam because I'd seen Arthur Miller's play THE CRUCIBLE. My goal was to demonstrate that women could be as wicked as men. As I began researching, I remember having one of those kind of 'ah-hah!' experiences, where I was reading a book in which the author said he was at a loss to explain the hallucinations of all these people in Salem. It was that word 'hallucinations' that made everything click. Years and years ago, when I was a little kid, I had read about the French case of ergot poisoning, and I made the connection between the two."
More at link...
http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/history/ergot.htm
It seems so...
Linnda Caporael may have solved one of the biggest mysteries of early American history — the cause of the Salem Witch Trials — but she stumbled onto the case quite by accident. "I actually started this project as a senior in college," recalls Caporael, now a behavioral scientist and full professor at Photo of Linnda Caporael Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. "I had one of those standard senior problems where you are going for graduation check-out and find you are missing a critical course. Mine was a history course. I enrolled in one, and had to immediately write a paper, which I decided to do on Anne Putnam because I'd seen Arthur Miller's play THE CRUCIBLE. My goal was to demonstrate that women could be as wicked as men. As I began researching, I remember having one of those kind of 'ah-hah!' experiences, where I was reading a book in which the author said he was at a loss to explain the hallucinations of all these people in Salem. It was that word 'hallucinations' that made everything click. Years and years ago, when I was a little kid, I had read about the French case of ergot poisoning, and I made the connection between the two."
More at link...
