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In every way the early Salem symptoms conformed to those of Elizabeth Knapp, the Goodwin children, and the two young women to whose bedsides Mather rushed post-Salem. We will never know what felled the girls, whether it had more to do with their souls or their chores, with parental attention or inattention. The prickling sensations, the twitching, stammering, and grimacing, the ulcerated skin and twisted limbs, the curled tongues and convex backs, the deliriums, the “furious invectives against imaginary individuals” do however conform precisely to what nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, with Freud following him, termed hysteria. Where the seventeenth-century authority saw the devil, we tend to recognize an overtaxed nervous system; what an earlier age called hysteria we term conversion disorder, the body literally translating emotions into symptoms. When sublimated, distress will manifest physically, holding the body hostage. Charcot’s drawings of convulsing hysterics agree in every detail with the scenes that left Deodat Lawson reeling.
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