2. Her very simple medicines, viz., anise-seed and liquors produced extraordinary violent effects.
3. She told such as would not take her physic that they would never be healed; and accordingly their diseases and hurts continued, with relapses against the ordinary course.
4. Things which she foretold came to pass accordingly.
5. She could tell of secret speeches which she had no ordinary means to come to knowledge of.
6. While in prison, in the clear daylight, there was seen in her arms ... a little child ... which at the officer’s approach ran and vanished.
7. The maid that fell sick at sight of that child “was cured by the said Margaret, who used means to be employed to that end.”
The only charge proved? If it was proved that “she was a successful practitioner, using only simple remedies,” then each one of the other six is just as clearly proved as her successful practice, and by the same document, too. But some of them are more difficult to account for on sadducean grounds, and were left unnoticed. Even the admitted marvel is put forth in distorted form, being so draped as to teach that the woman was a successful medical practitioner, while the original record reads that her simples produced extraordinary violent effects. No doubt she was in an important sense “a successful practitioner, using only simple remedies.” But that is not what the testimony specially stated. The historic evidence is, that her simples produced “violent effects.” Her fate teaches that the action of her simples was deemed diabolical. Is that idea conveyed in calling her a successful practitioner? No.
The case of this woman is vastly more instructive than it has been deemed by former expounders; and since, in its varied features and aspects, it presents many interesting points, we shall dwell upon it at considerable length.
Nothing has been met with in her history which conflicts with supposition that she and her husband, perhaps in or below the middle ranks of society, were laboring for a livelihood amid a clear-headed, sagacious, hardy, industrious community, which had resided twenty years around the mouth of the Charles without any startling witchcraft among them, or any teachers of that art, (?) or skillful co-operators in its practice. Something induced her to lay hands upon and administer simple medicines to the pained, the sick, or the wounded. Whence the impulse? We can hardly suppose that she had studied medicine. A nurse she may have been—very likely had been—and perhaps had become conscious of ability to relieve sufferings and disease, and may have been known by her neighbors to be willing to practice the healing art. Obviously they became accustomed to submit themselves to her manipulations and medical treatment quite extensively, and at length were astonished at the extreme efficacy of her hands, and the sometimes violent action of her simple medicines.
So extraordinary were the effects of her labors that the neighborhood became suspicious that an obnoxious one from below was her helper, and therefore she was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft.