"Crazy brained": Mental illness in colonial America

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 70, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 361-386

  Eldridge, Larry D ^a  

^a NONE

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ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; MENTAL DISEASE; UNITED STATES;

HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MENTAL DISORDERS; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0030238707     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (196)

1. Albert Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America: A History of Their Care and Treatment from Colonial Times, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 53.
2. Most of the colonies recorded some cases. Mainland cases come from the colonies of Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Haven, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and the Province of Maine. The few Caribbean cases come primarily from Barbados, and are taken from the abstracts in Noel W. Sainsbury et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1860-1910) (hereinafter cited as CSP). Until 1752, officials in England and her colonies used the Old Style (Julian) Calendar to date government documents. In this system, the new year began on March 25 - rather than on January 1, as is now the case under the New Style (Gregorian) Calendar (based on the calendar ordained by Gregory XIII in 1582). Dates are here rendered Old Style, as they appear in the records, with both years appended through the twenty-fourth day of March (as in March 4, 1681/82). To make reading easier, spelling and punctuation have been modernized in quotations except in occasional obvious instances. I have opted in this essay to use the expression "mental illness" rather than "mental illnesses," but that is not to imply a singular diagnosis for the many forms that mental disorders take.
3. See George F. Dow, ed., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1636-1683, 8 vols. (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1911-21), 2: 299 (hereinafter cited as MA/ECC);
4. CSP (n. 2), 10: 545 [1680].
5. Manuscript Court Dockets of Chester County, Pennsylvania, Chester County Archives, West Chester, Pa., 2: 18 (hereinafter cited as PA/CCD).
6. John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 167. Regarding the development of the word "lunacy," one author has observed that "the moon was thought to control the amount of moisture in the human body, and the brain, as the moistest part of the body, was believed to be particularly subject to its influence.
7. Hence the notion of the insane as 'lunatic' or 'moonstruck'" (Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic [New York: Scribner, 1971], p. 296).
8. Minutes of the Town Courts of Newtown [New York], 1656-1690 (New York: Historical Records Survey, 1940), p. 179 [1671].
9. William Hand Brown et al., eds., Archives of Maryland, 72 vols, to date (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1884-), 54: 173 (hereinafter cited as MD/A).
10. CSP (n. 2), 13: 117 [1689].
11. CSP Ibid., 7: 286 [1671].
12. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 46.
13. For other typical examples, see MA/ECC (n. 3). 2: 297-98 [1661];
14. CSP (n. 2), 10: 393 [1679, Maryland];
15. John Noble and John F. Cronin, eds., Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1630-1692, 3 vols. (Boston: County of Suffolk, 1901-28), 1: 201 [1681] (hereinafter cited as MA/CAR);
16. CSP (n. 2), 13: 149 [1689, New York];
17. the Abel Hardenbroeck case in Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674, anno domini, 7 vols. (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1897), 7: 9-10 [1673].
18. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628-1686, 5 vols, in 6 (Boston: William White, Printer to the Commonwealth, 1853-54), 2: 160 (hereinafter cited as AM/GCR).
19. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 43.
20. Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 111.
21. AM/ECC (n. 3), 3: 176 [1664].
22. "Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671-1680," in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Collections XXIX and XXX, 2 vols. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1933), 1: 436 (hereinafter cited as MA/SCC).
23. Robert N. Toppan, comp., "Dudley Records," Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d ser., 1899, 13: 230.
24. MD/A (n. 7), 53: 427 [1662].
25. For other examples, see John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal: "History of New England," 1630-1649, ed. James Kendall Hosmer, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1946), 2: 20 (hereinafter cited as MA/JWJ);
26. MD/A (n. 7), 54: 199 [1660];
27. MA/ECC (n. 3), 3: 319-20 [1666],
28. MA/ECC 4: 88.
29. Mary Ann Jimenez maintains that "distraction was the most common name for ordinary madness" in eighteenth-century Massachusetts (Mary Ann Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987], pp. 14, 22; quotation on p. 14), but I have not found that to be so for the colonies in the seventeenth century.
30. MA/ECC (n. 3), 4: 290 [1670].
31. MA/GCR (n. 11), 5: 490.
32. MA/ECC (n. 3), 4: 219 [1669/70].
33. In 1689, Mary Phips's Middlesex County tutor "found her void of common reason and understanding that is in other children of her age, not capable of discerning between good and evil or any morality" (Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699 [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986], p. 138).
34. MA/ECC (n. 3), 1: 331 [1653/54].
35. For some other examples of unclear descriptions, see MA/ECC ibid., 1: 193 [1650],
36. MA/ECC 3: 403 [1666/67];
37. CSP (n. 2), 7: 169 [1671, Carolina];
38. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 151.
39. MA/ECC (n. 3), 3: 64 [1663].
40. For other related Quaker examples, see MA/ECC ibid., 3: 17 [1662];
41. CSP (n. 2), 7: 493 [1673, Barbados].
42. Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 175.
43. MA/ECC (n. 3), 2: 156 [1659].
44. CSP (n. 2), 11: 388, 390 [1682/83, New Hampshire].
45. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 2: 287 [1646].
46. MD/A (n. 7), 54: 118-19 [1657].
47. MA/ECC (n. 3), 4: 26 [1668].
48. MA/ECC Ibid., 4: 245 [1670]. Though descriptions of symptoms in individual cases were usually scant in court records, other sources provide more general contemporary discussions of the symptoms of mental illness.
49. A good example is Cotton Mather, The Angel of Bethesda, ed. Gordon W. Jones (Barre, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers, 1972), pp. 129-37 passim.
50. MA/ECC (n. 3), 1: 388 [1654/55].
51. For more on Holdred, see MA/ECC ibid., 2: 158-59.
52. Susie M. Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1640-45 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, for the Virginia Historical Society, 1973), pp. 290, 291.
53. PA/CCD (n. 4), 2: 26-27 [1698],
54. PA/CCD 56 [1699/1700].
55. Charles T. Libby, Neal W. Allen, and Robert E. Moody, eds., Province and Court Records of Maine, 1636-1692, 4 vols. (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1928-58), 2: 50.
56. Province and Court Records of Maine, 1636-1692, Ibid., 2: 189 [1684].
57. MA/ECC (n. 3), 1: 187 [1649/50].
58. Leon de Valinger, Jr., ed., Court Records of Kent County, Delaware, 1680-1705 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1959), pp. 3-4 (hereinafter cited as DE/KC).
59. When women in New England experienced fits, Lyle Koehler has noted, "people came from miles around to watch them. Neighbors also spent much time at the homes of the afflicted" (Koehler, Search for Power [n. 23], p. 170).
60. CSP (n. 2), 7: 137, 138 [1670, Barbados]. It is possible that Brayne suffered from congestive heart failure severe enough to impair kidney function; such a condition could produce the symptoms described.
61. For a detailed discussion of the New England "languishing" cases cited, and others, see Koehler, Search for Power (n. 23), pp. 167-70.
62. David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, rev. ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 4.
63. MD/A (n. 7), 54: 192 [1660].
64. The most consistent statements regarding mental health were made by colonists in wills to indicate that they were in command of their mental faculties. That was necessary because in order to make a will, one had literally to know one's own will in the matter. A Bay Colony woman wrote her will while lying on her death bed "in perfect sense and memory" (MA/ECC [n. 3], 4: 313).
65. Exactly the same expression was used in other colonies. For some Virginia examples, see H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 1622-1632, 1670-1676, with Notes and Excerpts from Original Council and General Court Records, Into 1683, Now Lost (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1924), pp. 166, 168, 173, 196 (hereinafter cited as VA/ GCR).
66. Other common expressions included "sound and perfect in mind and memory," "well in body and mind and memory," and "being of perfect memory." For typical examples, see MA/ECC (n. 3), 2: 429;
67. VA/GCR (n. 40), pp. 33, 50, 123;
68. Susie M. Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1632-40 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1954), pp. 61, 157.
69. A. J. F. van Laer, ed., Court Minutes of Albany, Rensselaerswyck, and Schenectady, 1668-1685, 3 vols. (Albany: University Press of New York, 1926-32), 2: 313 [1678].
70. Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, 3 vols. (Harrisburg, 1838-40), 1: 378 (hereinafter cited as PA/PCR).
71. CSP (n. 2), 12: 603, 606 [1688, Barbados].
72. For a thorough discussion of mental illness in later colonial Barbados, see Lawrence E. Fisher, Colonial Madness: Mental Health in the Barbadian Social Order (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985).
73. MA/SCC (n. 15), 1: 101-2 [1679].
74. See also Edwin Powers's discussion of this case in Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts: A Documentary History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 236.
75. Thompson, Sex in Middlesex (n. 20), p. 188.
76. Thompson adds that Cutler eventually became "completely deranged" and spent the last thirteen years of his life "in the care of the Woburn selectmen" (Sex in Middlesex ibid., p. 224 n. 19).
77. MA/ECC (n. 3), 3: 176 [1664].
78. MA/ECC Ibid., 3: 149 [1664].
79. H. R. McIlwaine and John P. Kennedy, eds., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619-1776, 13 vols. (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1924), 2: 8, 13 [1660/61].
80. CSP (n. 2), 11: 120 [1681, New Hampshire].
81. MA/ECC (n. 3), 6: 228 [1676].
82. MD/A (n. 7), 54: 491 [1671].
83. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 1: 209-10 [1637].
84. In a similar incident, "one Turner of Charlestown, a man of about 50 years of age, having led a loose and disorderly life," found himself "wounded in conscience at a sermon of Mr. Shepherd's," but "he kept it in and did not discover his distress to such as might have offered him help"; then, "after a good space he went out from his wife on the Lord's day at night, having kept at home all that day, and drowned himself in a little pit where was not above two feet water" (MA/JWJ ibid., 2: 55 [1642]).
85. Demos, Entertaining Satan (n. 5), p. 90.
86. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 53.
87. Gerald N. Grob, Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 12 n. 9.
88. Koehler, Search for Power (n. 23), pp. 482-83;
89. Demos, Entertaining Satan (n. 5), p. 22.
90. MA/ECC (n. 3), 4: 207-9 [1669].
91. Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness (n. 17), p. 145.
92. Jimenez is quoting Cotton Mather, "Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions," in Early American Imprints, 1639-1800, ed. Clifford K. Shipton (New York: Readex Microprint, 1963-), p. 107.
93. MA/ECC (n. 3), 3: 298 [1666].
94. Demos, Entertaining Satan (n. 5), p. 90.
95. Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness (n. 17), p. 14.
96. Cotton Mather certainly believed in witchcraft, observing and analyzing it as he did mental illness, but he saw no necessary relationship between the two. "Maniacks," he once noted, "are sometimes more or less Demoniacks" (Mather, Angel of Bethesda [n. 29], p. 130; emphasis added).
97. For related information and perspectives, see Simon Kemp and Kevin Williams, "Demonic Possession and Mental Disorder in Medieval and Early Modern Europe," Psychological Medicine, 1987, 17: 21-29;
98. David Harley, "Mental Illness, Magical Medicine and the Devil in Northern England, 1650-1700," in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 114-44;
99. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
100. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 2: 193 [1644].
101. MA/JWJ Ibid., 2: 209-10 [1644].
102. In 1642, a Bay Colony miller was struck senseless when a bolt of lightening hit his mill during a storm. After a day or so "he came to his senses," and though he "found himself very sore on diverse parts of his body," the man "knew nothing of what had befallen him" (MA/JWJ ibid., 2: 63 [1642]).
103. MA/JWJ Ibid., 2: 83 [1642].
104. MA/JWJ Ibid., 2: 225 [1645].
105. Koehler, Search for Power (n. 23), p. 170.
106. This view continued into the eighteenth century as well. David Rothman has noted that poverty and need, including that flowing from mental illness, "was not thought symptomatic of a critical defect in the social order" (Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum [n. 39], p. 5).
107. Rutman, Place in Time (n. 13), pp. 108-13.
108. Roger Thompson's discussion of this is useful, though his comment that "not being able to live comfortably together was a kind of madness" may go too far (Thompson, Sex in Middlesex [n. 20], pp. 153-54).
109. MD/A (n. 7), 54: 425, 428 [1669].
110. For similar Maryland examples, see MD/A ibid., pp. 439, 544, 579.
111. CSP (n. 2), 10: 522 [1680].
112. Powers, Crime and Punishment (n. 44), pp. 439-40, 529.
113. For the 1678 and 1694 laws, see Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness (n. 17), pp. 50-51.
114. For the Connecticut law and a useful discussion of colonial legislation, see Grob, Mental Institutions in America (n. 55), pp. 8-9.
115. For a typical 1683 New York law, see Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum (n. 39), p. 4.
116. For a Pennsylvania statute, see Gail Mcknight Beckman, compiler, The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania in the Time of William Penn (New York: Vantage Press, 1976), 1: 88 [1664].
117. CSP (n. 2), 1: 280 [1638, Virginia].
118. MA/ECC (n. 3), 4: 406-7 [1671].
119. For similar examples, see Thompson, Sex in Middlesex (n. 20), p. 138;
120. Demos, Entertaining Satan (n. 5), p. 433 n. 121.
121. CSP (n. 2), 13: 623, 628 [1692, New York].
122. Eli Faber, "Puritan Criminals: The Economic, Social, and Intellectual Background to Crime in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts," Perspectives in American History, 1978, 11: 129.
123. Early Records of the Town of Providence [Rhode Island], 21 vols. (Providence: Snow and Farnhaw, City Printer, 1892), 2: 89.
124. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer, eds., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, 1620-1692, 12 vols. (Boston: William White, Printer to the Commonwealth, 1855-61), 5: 178 (hereinafter cited as PLY/CR).
125. MA/GCR (n. 11), 2: 199;
126. MA/GCR 3: 140, 232, 329, 363;
127. MA/GCR 4/1: 208, 244.
128. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 48.
129. MD/A (n. 7), 54: 328.
130. Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven [1638-1665], 2 vols. (Hartford: Case, Tiffany, 1857), 1: 203, 414 [1645].
131. DE/KC (n. 36), 158 [1699/1700].
132. Koehler, Search for Power (n. 23), p. 170.
133. VA/GCR (n. 40), pp. 294, 307 [1671/72].
134. For a much earlier similar case, see CSP (n. 2), 1: 294 [1639].
135. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 48.
136. Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness (n. 17), p. 43.
137. The list of remedies is taken from Koehler, Search for Power (n. 23), p. 169.
138. Mather, Angel of Bethesda (n. 29), pp. 131-32.
139. Cures for the "morbid states of the melancholy humors" were mostly herbal in seventeenth-century England: see Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness (n. 17), p. 19.
140. On the availability of physicians, see Grob, Mental Institutions in America (n. 55), p. 10.
141. Physicians then as now sometimes mistreated their patients, and that included the mentally disturbed. When Pennsylvania authorities ordered one physician to cure Ann Collins "of her madness" in 1697, he took advantage of her condition and sexually molested her; the incident came to light after she petitioned for redress, in a manner of speaking: see PA/PCR (n. 42), 1: 512 [1697].
142. Edward Armstrong, ed., "The Record of the Court at Upland, in Pennsylvania, 1676-1681," Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Memoirs, 1860, 7: 102-3 [1678].
143. Samuel A. Bates, ed., Records of the Town of Braintree [Massachusetts], 1640-1793 (Randolf, Mass.: Daniel H. Huxford, 1886), p. 26 (hereinafter cited as MA/BTR).
144. Jimenez discusses this case as well as a similar one in 1701 that centered on a "distracted child" who was eventually ordered "to be kept in a little house" (Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness [n. 17], pp. 38-39).
145. For the Paul case and the related commentary, see Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 40.
146. For a discussion of the limited use of imprisonment in the early colonies, see Larry D. Eldridge, A Distant Heritage: The Growth of Free Speech in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 108-13.
147. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 1: 144 [1634].
148. MA/BTR (n. 94), pp. 41, 43, 46.
149. David Cressy, Coming Over. Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 197.
150. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum (n. 39), p. 27.
151. For a good general discussion of the development of poor laws and their colonial application, see Grob, Mental Institutions in America (n. 55), pp. 6-10.
152. Edgar J. McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England: Criminal Justice and Due Process, 1620-1692 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 105.
153. John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, 10 vols. (Providence, R.I.: A. Crawford Greene and Brothers, State Printers, 1856-65), 1: 167 [1647].
154. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 50.
155. MA/ECC (n. 3), 4: 88 [1669].
156. MA/ECC Ibid., 3: 458 [1667].
157. For more on Clinton, see MA/ECC ibid., 6: 344 [1677];
158. MA/CAR (n. 10), 1: 208 [1681].
159. Edmund B. O'Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York; Procured in Holland, England and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, Esq., Agent, 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1853-87), 2: 689-90 [1673/74].
160. PLY/CR (n. 80), 6: 20 [1679].
161. Koehler, Search for Power (n. 23), p. 200.
162. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 1: 282-83 [1638];
163. MA/CAR (n. 10), 2: 78;
164. MA/GCR (n. 11), 1: 246 [1636].
165. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 2: 60-61 [1642];
166. MA/CAR (n. 10), 2: 126.
167. Hett may have tried to kill another of her children back in 1637: see MA/JWJ (n. 17), 1: 230 [1637];
168. though the woman's name is not given, the discussion of the case and later references to it make Hett the likely offender. Mary Parsons, a woman in some "distraction," killed one of her own children in Springfield, Massachusetts: see Demos, Entertaining Satan (n. 5), pp. 433-34 n. 126;
169. McManus, Law and Liberty (n. 101), pp. 104-5, 157.
170. Not all mothers who killed their children were described in the records as mentally disturbed. In 1632, for example, Virginia authorities ordered Margaret Hatch to be hanged for "murdering her child"; she tried to avoid execution by claiming to be pregnant, but a jury of matrons examined her and found that she was not (VA/GCR [n. 40], p. 480 [1632]).
171. For a general discussion of infanticide, see Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1803 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
172. In this regard, see Gerald Grob's conclusion and his source note in Mental Institutions in America (n. 55), p. 11 n. 7.
173. Mental Institutions in America Ibid., p. 12 n. 9. Regarding regional differences, it should be noted that while substantially more cases in this study came from New England, that is largely a function of the sources: New Englanders kept much more complete records, and secondary works tend to be heavily slanted in that direction.
174. Koehler, Search for Power (n. 23), p. 168.
175. Koehler's figure may be skewed because his research focused on women. He also noted that in New England during the 1620-1709 years a relatively high proportion (38.9 percent) of suicides were women; women favored drowning (47 percent), while men preferred hanging (59.3 percent): Search for Power ( ibid., p. 176.
176. In modern psychiatry, "there is unanimous agreement that women are more often depressed than men" (Jonathan Bloom-Feshbach et al., The Psychology of Separation and Loss: Perspectives on Development, Life Transitions, and Clinical Practice [San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987], p. 533).
177. "During childhood, depression is more common in boys than girls," Judy Folkenberg adds, "but after puberty, depressive disorders occur more frequently in teenage girls - a trend that continues into adulthood" (Judy Folkenberg, "Men, Women Different in Mental Illness, Substance Abuse," Public Health Reports, 1992, 107: 126).
178. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 41.
179. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum (n. 39), p. 14.
180. Glenn W. LaFantasie, ed., The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols. (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, for the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1988), 1: 330. "Mrs. Weston," LaFantasie notes, "was actually Margaret Goodwin, the wife of Adam Goodwin, though she had been formerly married to Francis Weston" (ibid.).
181. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 2: 94 [1643].
182. CSP (n. 2), 7: 128 [1670, Virginia].
183. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 2: 196 [1644].
184. MD/A (n. 7), 65: 663 [1675].
185. Craig W. Horle, ed., Records of the Courts of Sussex County Delaware, 1677-1710, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 2: 928 [1694].
186. CSP (n. 2), 9: 351 [1676].
187. Colonists also widely applied the term "distempered" to the mentally ill as well as to physical ailments, including the self-induced. "Distempered with drink" was a commonplace phrase in colonial records, for example. John Johnson offers a typical case: when on trial for beating Ann Sawars in 1659, he told Massachusetts authorities that he was drunk and did not remember the incident; seeking clemency, he added, "I hope God will keep me from such distemper for time to come." The judges hoped that, too, but still made him choose between a public whipping and a forty-shilling fine for his assault on the girl (AM/ECC [n. 3], 2: 155-56 [1659]).
188. Mary Ann Jimenez, in examining Cotton Mather's Angel of Bethesda (n. 29), notes that "inclusion of a discussion of insanity in a work that dealt with physical illness is one indication of the direction in which his thinking was moving"
189. (Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness [n. 17], p. 20). She makes the comment amidst a chapter emphasizing supernatural explanations of mental illness in the seventeenth century. Yet that supposed "direction" was clearly evident in the descriptions of cases widely used in the colonies throughout the seventeenth century.
190. Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness (n. 17), p. 50.
191. MA/JWJ (n. 17), 1: 99-100 [1633].
192. H. Clay Reed and George J. Miller, eds., The Burlington Court Book: A Record of Quaker Jurisprudence in West New Jersey, 1680-1709 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1944), pp. 60-61 [1686].
193. MA/ECC (n. 3), 3: 352 [1666].
194. Deutsch, Mentally Ill in America (n. 1), p. 43.
195. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 162.
196. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 1977 p. 162. Ibid.