On 12/21/98, Sandy Schroeder <[email protected]> wrote: >Although we are not descendants of the Salem witches, (at least not so far) >My granddaughter is doing a social studies on the Salem Witch Trials. We >have been trying to find info about the rye mold/fungus that supposedly >caused a lot of the problems. > >Can someone help her? Linda Caporael's 1976 theory (published in SCIENCE, Vol. 192, when she was a graduate student in biology at the UCSB) claimed that ergot -- a poisonous, hallucinegenic mold which can develop on rye grain -- could have been responsible for the symptoms of the afflicted in Salem in 1692. Her theory was discounted almost immediately by Spanos and Gottlieb, psychologists from Carleton University, in "Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials", SCIENCE, Vol. 194, (24 Dec 1976) pp. 1390-1394. You can find reprints of both of these articles in Witches & Historians: Interpretations of Salem, edited by Marc Mappen, Marc (Keiger: Malabar, Florida. 1996), which is available from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0882756532/ograms17thcenturA/ One of the arguments against the ergotism theory which I find most compelling is that other people living in the same households, and who we should surmise were eating the same food, were not afflicted. Additionally, ergot victims suffer from severe intestinal pain and diahhrea, and there is no record of these symptoms documented. In fact, when not in the throes of their fits, the afflicted were acknowledged to be hale and hearty -- which would not be the case if ergotism were the cause. There are still many people who find it an appealing folk theory to attribute this incomprehensible behavior to drugs, but most serious historians have discounted it because the actual symptoms of ergotism simply do not fit the facts as we know them, and the symptoms had a suspicious habit of turning on and off too conveniently, and often in group unison, which is more indicative of fits that are psychological rather than biological. Cheers, --Margo Margo Burns, Webweaver [email protected] http://www.ogram.org Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." -- Chomsky