In Rosalyn Schanzer’s The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster In Salem, the Salem witch trials were a series of trials set in Salem Massachusetts.When two girls named Betty and Abigail started having fits the people of Salem started to accuse just about anyone for anything. It started small but then everyone started to do it. If you tried to stop the trials you get accused. People were killed for being falsely accused of witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials was influenced by the ergot poisoning, revenge for a widowed man’s debt, and possibilities of mental illness. Could the things that the Puritans have seen all been hallucination from ergot poisoning. “Ergot thrives in warm, damp, rainy springs and summers. When Caporael examined the diaries …show more content…
“Looking at historical documents dating back to the 15th century, Dr Quintanilla was able to match the symptoms of people condemned as witches with associated neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy and hysteria”(Witchcraft or Mental Illness?). Mental illness could also explain the extreme piousness. It can also explain why people have changed their stories and purposely injure themselves in court. “Hysteria and epilepsy were the 2 illnesses that were most frequently confused with witchcraft or demonic possession, especially if they were accompanied by tremors, convulsions or of loss of consciousness.”(Witchcraft or Mental Illness?). The people that were afflicted might have had one of these illnesses. It would make sense that they were mentally sick. “an uncontrollable outburst of emotion or fear, often characterized by irrationality, laughter, weeping, etc.” and “a disorder of the nervous system, characterized either by mild, episodic loss of attention or sleepiness (petit mal) or by severe convulsions with loss of consciousness” are the effects of hysteria and epilepsy(dictionary.com). Mental illness is a reasonable cause considering that the side effects of hysteria and epilepsy are sound exactly the fits that afflicted girls