Healer or Hag? Female Medical Practitioners and Witch Accusations in 17th-Century New England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 17th-century New England, many women provided valuable medical services to their communities without formal training as midwives and healers. They were generally well-respected by their patients and trusted to testify as medical experts in cases of paternity, rape, and witchcraft at community forums. Yet this trust was capricious; female medical practitioners could easily be accused of being witches, usually for failing to heal a patient or causing illness through supernatural means. This paper examines two women who practiced medicine and were accused of witchcraft in 17th-century New England. The details and circumstances surrounding the witchcraft accusations against Jane Hawkins of Boston, Massachusetts in 1637 and Ann Burt of Lynn, Massachusetts in 1669 are gathered from court documents, journal articles, and secondary source materials. In analysing the cases of Jane Hawkins and Ann Burt, several themes are explored to explain why early female medical practitioners tread a thin line between trusted healers and witches. In Hawkins’ case, inexplicable medical maladies were often attributed to witchcraft when a woman was involved and she did not fit Puritan ideals of how a woman should behave. In Burt’s case, an accusation of witchcraft was used by male physicians to eliminate competing female healers in a crowded medical marketplace. Both Hawkins and Burt practiced medicine in a manner that threatened the inherent power differential favouring men, leading to witchcraft accusations intending to destroy their credibility as medical practitioners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".