America’s First Autopsy was a Witch Hunt

“Father, help me,” cried Elizabeth Kelly. “Goodwife Ayres is upon me! She chokes me, she kneels on my belly, she will break my bowels, she pinches me! Goodwife Ayres torments me, she pricks me with pins, she will kill me! Get the broad axe and cut off her head,” the girl begged her father, who could do little more than stand by, and hear his daughter’s last gasp, “Goodwife Ayres chokes me.”

Hartford Witch Trails

Familiar as this melodrama might sound to students of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, neither the afflicted girl, Elizabeth Kelly, nor the alleged witch, Goodwife Ayers, lived in Massachusetts, and Salem judges such as Samuel Sewall would not hear the infamous Witch Trials for another 31 years.

Contrary to common assumption, New England’s first “witch” execution wasn’t in Salem. Alice Young resided in Hartford, Connecticut. She was hanged in 1647. Over the next 50 years, ten more suspected witches would meet their end in Connecticut. During 1662, nine were tried as witches. Four were convicted. Since its very first Legal Code, Connecticut listed witchcraft as a capital offense. Betraying a deep and true fear of witches, items two and five below, from the original Connecticut Blue Laws, relate to witchcraft, and stipulate the death penalty:

2. If any man or woman bee a Witch that is hath or consulteth with a familiar spirritt they shall bee put to death Exodus 22 18 Levit 20 27 Deut 18 10 11

 5. If any person shall slay another through guile either by poisonings or other such Devellish practice hee shall bee put to death Exo 21 14

 Circumstances surrounding Elizabeth Kelly’s accusation of Goodwife Ayers render her case quite different from any other in the colonies. Eight-year-old Elizabeth, the victim of the alleged witchery, was not only delusional, she was clearly physically ill—she died within days of the onset of her pain.

In 1893, a writer for JAMA suggested that Elizabeth Kelly suffered from “some form of bronchial pneumonia attended with delirium.” Elizabeth’s parents, however, as well as other people of Hartford, wanted to know exactly what killed the girl. Everyone in town was aware that Elizabeth, in pain for days, screamed about how Goodwife Ayers was hurting her. Walter Woodward claims that Hartford also knew that Goodwife Ayres enjoyed “spreading stories of encounters with the devil.”

Hartford was ready to believe that Goodwife Ayers was indeed a witch, but interested people were prudent enough to call for an expert opinion- not from, as typically, clergy or a Judge, but from a respected, if unskilled, local

America's First Autopsy

physician, Bray Rossiter. Mr. Rossiter lived in Guilford, Connecticut, and 20-mile travel from Hartford. It took Bray Rossiter several days to arrive at the gravesite, at which he performed the first recorded autopsy in Connecticut; JAMA claims that Rossiter performed the first postmortem in America.

Bray Rossiter tackled the necropsy with the assistance of the schoolmaster, William Pitkin. At least six others witnessed the procedure.

“All these six particulars underwritten I judge preternatural,” writes Rossiter. “Upon the opening of John Kelly’s child at the grave I observed:

 1.  The whole body, the muscular parts, nerves and joints were all pliable without stiffness or contraction, the gullet only excepted. Experience of dead bodies renders such symptoms unusual.

2.  From the costall ribs to the bottom of the belly in the whole latitude of the womb, both the scarf skin and the whole skin with the enveloping or covering flesh had a deep blue tincture, when the inward part thereof was fresh, and the bowels under it in true order, without any discoverable pecaney to cause such an effort or symptom.

3.  No quantity or appearance of blood was in either venter or cavity as belly or breast, but in the throat only at the very swallow where was a large quantity as that part could well contain, both fresh and fluid no way congealed or clodded as it comes from a vein opened, that I stroked it out with my finger as water.

4.  There was the appearance of pure fresh blood in the backside of the arm, affecting the skin as blood itself, without bruising or congealing.

5.  The bladder of gall was all broken and curded, without any tincture in the adjacent parts.

6.  The gullet or swallow was contracted like a hard fish bone that hardly a large pease could be forced through.

The doctor clearly hadn’t studied many cadavers. The symptoms he describes are common to corpses several days old. He may have been examining a body but, along with the rest of Hartford, Rossiter was hunting for a witch. Unlike inquisitors past and future, Rossiter studied the victim for the effects of the witch, rather than the witch herself, even though Goodwife Ayers was present for at least part of the inquest.

Hell Broke Loose in Hartford

Bray Rossiter’s medical report did not commit him- in writing- to the conclusion that Goodwife Ayers was a witch. Confronted by symptoms and characteristics unfamiliar to his limited medical knowledge, Rossiter swore that Elizabeth Kelly suffered unnatural harm. Hartford knew exactly what his report said between its lines: his autopsy proved Goodwife Ayers was a witch. A man of science corroborated, and tapped, one of the deepest Puritan fears. All Hell was breaking loose in Hartford.

Rossiter’s autopsy unleashed panic in Hartford. Over the next eight months, Hartford tried eight witches. The Hartford Witch Trials predate the Salem Witch Trials by three decades.

Goodwife Ayers and her husband abandoned their young son, skipped town, and avoided a sure death sentence from acting Hartford authorities.

Recommended Sources:

Hall, David D. Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England

“The First Postmortem Recorded In The Country.” JAMA 21:661-662. October 28, 1893.

St. George, Robert Blair. Conversing By Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture.

Woodward, Walter. “New England’s Other Witch Hunt: the Hartford Witch-Hunt of the 1660’s and Changing Patterns in Witchcraft Prosecution.” Magazine of History 17:4; July 2003.

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Samuel Mitchell, Expert Witness to Trance Preacher Rachel Baker

When he wasn’t busy giving speeches celebrating the opening of the Erie Canal, classifying fish, or founding colleges, polymath Samuel Mitchell, a senator from New York, spent time in the field in which he received University training: medicine.

Samuel Mitchell was graduated from Scotland’s prestigious University of Edinburgh. Among virtually innumerable pursuits, he saw patients, at least early in his career, but his lasting recognition as a man of medicine has more to do with research than practice, as attested by his contributions to the development of anesthesiology, or his founding of The Medical Repository, the first medical journal first published in the United States.

Mitchell was routinely consulted on a wide range of matters of science. The groundbreaking pamphlet, The Surprising Case of Rachel Baker, Who Prays and Preaches in her Sleep, finds the eminent Samuel Mitchell on a panel of five physicians called as informal expert witnesses to Baker’s somnambulist sermons.

Although the stenographer Mais’ role in writing the book outweighed that of Mitchell, who contributed the introduction, the publication of Baker’s performance positions Mitchell as a bit player in a groundbreaking, and trendsetting, piece of work. Mitchell’s primary role was to lend credence to the recording of the events, and only secondarily, if appropriate, reflect upon the substance of the events, or contribute medical diagnosis.

That being said, Mitchell, who never wasted an opportunity to expound- and usually at some length- wrote an introduction to the book that “evinced psychological views of original combination,” per the New York Journal of Medicine, and drew parallels between Baker’s symptoms and those of one suffering from epilepsy or hysteria. He concluded that Baker’s state of consciousness was between waking and sleep.

Mitchell studied neither somnambulism nor multiple personality disorder after observing Baker in 1814. As the century rolled on, however, somnambulism, more specifically in the context of the trance speakers and writers, would come to play a substantial role in popular culture, science and, perhaps most importantly, the women’s movement and other aspects of political reform. The psychology of multiple personality disorder continues to evolve.

The Surprising Case of Rachel Baker, Who Prays and Preaches in her Sleep is important as an early contribution to both fields.

See also A Chaos of Knowledge, Samuel Latham Mitchell

 

For further reading:

Mais, Charles and Samuel Mitchill. The Surprising Case Of Rachel Baker, Who Prays And Preaches In Her Sleep: With Specimens Of Her Extraordinary Performances Taken Down Accurately In Short Hand At The Time …: The Whole Authenticated By The Most Respectable Testimony Of Living Witnesses.

 

Rieber, Robert W. The Bifurcation of the Self: the History and Theory of Disassociation and its Disorders.

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Margaret Fuller’s Conversations

“Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” – Margaret Fuller

  

 Seminal American feminist and influential Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. 

Margaret Fuller

By her mid-twenties, Fuller had developed a list of friends and collaborators that reads like a Who’s Who of the United States in the early to mid nineteenth century, covering Thoreau, Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Bronson Alcott.  

Intellectually aggressive, persuasive and charismatic, Fuller’s trailblazing spirit established her among the pantheon of notable teachers, thinkers, and writers of her era. She forced Harvard University to evolve, and grant her access to the library stacks. Attuned to inequality and social injustices, Fuller relentlessly exposed and addressed aspects of culture and society in deep need of reform. Passionate in support of women’s suffrage and rights to an education, she was just as tenacious a proponent of the abolition of slavery and prison reform.  

Following her tenure replacing Elizabeth Peabody as a teacher at Boston’s Temple School, organized by Bronson Alcott, whose “controversial” pedagogical methods were steeped in the belief that all children were cable of learning well, and responded better to dialog rather than rote learning, Fuller initiated a series of philosophy workshops for women, conducted in the Socratic style.  

Fuller referred to these neo-Platonic workshops as “Conversations.” Enormously popular among educators, authors, the wives of politicians, and future luminaries of the women’s civil rights movement, the series ran for five years, during which she edited Emerson’s Transcendentalist periodical, The Dial. Her Conversations provided an unprecedented forum for women to discuss politics, morality, philosophy, and theories of social justice, topics of conversations to which women had not been previously invited as active participants.  

Margaret Fuller’s groundbreaking Feminist study, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, represents an embellished record of one of her Conversations.  

Just forty years after her birth in May 1810, Margaret Fuller drowned on June 19, 1850, with her husband and young son, following a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, New York.  

For Further Reading:  

Dickenson, Donna. Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman’s Life.  

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century.  

Von Mehren, Joan. Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller.

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