Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather was a minister of the Old North Church in Boston; his life and work illustrate two sides of early American scientific thinking. As a clergyman and a firm believer in divine revelation and miracles, he accepted unscientific notions as witchcraft and supported the Salem Witch Trials, although he later changed his position. He wrote hundreds of books and sermons and ranked highly among the early American theologians. He was also a scientist and only one of two colonial Americans to be elected to the Royal Society of London and advocated the study of science as a means of teaching about God. Cotton had no medical training but was considered a well-informed amateur physician and promoted medical advances such as the smallpox inoculation. His book The Angel of Bethesda, a catalog of common ailments and their remedies, made significant contributions to colonial American medicine. In spite of his success, however, Mather's personal life was filled with disappointment and anguish.

Cotton "found the study of witchcraft made to order for his neurotic and oversexed spirituality" and in 1689 he published the bestselling book on witchcraft, "Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions: A faithful account of many wonderful and surprising things, that have befallen several bewitched and possessed persons in New-England”

The book gives an account of an episode of supposed witchcraft a year earlier involving an Irish washerwoman, Goody Glover. The book account, describing the symptoms of witchcraft, was widely read and discussed throughout Puritan New England. The book was in the meager library of Samuel Parris, the Salem minister in whose house began the tragic events of 1692.

During the Salem trials in 1693, Cotton described the situation:

I believe there never was a poor plantation more pursued . . . than our New England. First, the Indian Powwows . . . then seducing spirits . . . after this a continual blast upon some of our principal grains . . . . Herewithal, wasting sickness. . . . Next, so many adversaries of our own language . . . desolating fires also . . . and losses by sea. . . . Besides all which, the devils are come upon us with such wrath as is justly . . . the astonishment of the world. (From John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan, p. 313.)