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During the year of 1692 in Salem four girls became oddly sick. The children had deliriums, fevers, pain, and even spoke in tongues. Even doctors could not explain this strange illness and as a result, blame came. The people of Salem started to blame the strange occurrences as work of witches living in Salem. Paranoia spread the town and soon enough, people blamed their neighbors and at least twenty-four people suspected to have been witches were dead. Some believe the witch trials were caused by a struggling economy which caused paranoia or the children created the sickness in order to have some fun, or simply because that is what Satan chose to do but, the most plausible understanding of the occurrence is an almost undetectable sickness caused by fungi and more specifically, rye bred. Rye bred explained the episodes, flourished in the year of 1692 due to the …show more content…
Symptoms such as: vomiting, crawling sensations on the skin, psychosis, delirium, hallucinations, and painful muscular contractions than could lead to seizures all appear in the cases of the four young girls. Because of the huge paranoia, a doctor named William Griggs was called in but he diagnosed them as a supernatural origin because of the lifestyle of the puritans and the new discovery of convulsive ergotism. To explain the supernatural origin is the perfect conditions for Ergot. In this particular year (1692) the conditions were perfect for the tainted rye bred. Ergot thrived in swampy weather which would also explain why the next summer, which was more dry, the sickness died out. As stated in the article,“There was a drought the next year, 1692, thus no contamination of the gain that year would be expected” (Caporael, Linda). Both the symptoms and abundance of Ergot in the area make Convulsive Ergot the most plausible cause of the

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