Salem Witch Trials In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

In reading The Crucible by Arthur Miller, it seems unfathomable in today’s world of science and logical reasoning, that such mass hysteria could break out. While we don’t blame supernatural witches any longer for strange behaviors, there are still many cases in recent history that can be paralleled to the Salem witch trials. One example is a 2012 case of over a dozen high schoolers in Le Roy, New York who developed uncontrollable tics with no obvious cause. When I chose to read The New York Times article, “What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy,” by Susan Dominus, I thought the case would give a clear psychological explanation for the cause of the girls’ afflictions, and give insight into why girls in Salem acted the way they did. However, like

Hales’ mere presence, and eventually his testimony, affirms in many people’s minds that witchcraft is happening in Salem, and it emboldens more accusations. The town’s leaders fail to consider until it is too late the possibility that the accusers and the confessors could be lying to protect themselves since confessing to witchcraft let you free with a tarnished reputation, while refusing to confess meant certain death. In Le Roy, a national expert, environmentalist Erin Brokovitch, came in to test the soil around the school. When the school forbade it, the afflicted, their families and the national audience jumped to the conclusion the school district was trying to hide something. Her presence and her insinuation that the tics were caused by the environment confirmed in most people’s minds that what the town of Le Roy was dealing with was environmental

Although not all of the girls, despite some taking antibiotics and others receiving behavioral therapy, most were improving as media attention gradually shifted away from the Le Roy case. She concluded with what has baffled everyone about the Le Roy case – simply that the psych is a complex and mysterious thing, and that something like the Le Roy incident or like The Crucible, it may be impossible to discover what the true root of the problem is. Dominus wrote, “there was no way to know whether the antibiotics were really doing the work or serving as placebos. Then again, even the benefits of therapy could be considered a placebo effect: to believe in mass hysteria is to believe in the power of the mind to convince itself of almost