A Fever in Salem: A New Interpretation of the New England Witch Trials. By Laurie Winn Carlson. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1999. Pp. xiii, 197. $24.95.)
The author of this book has proposed an intriguing hypothesis regarding the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Laurie Winn Carlson argues that accusations of witchcraft were linked to an epidemic of encephalitis and that it was a specific form of this disease, encephalitis lethargica, that accounts for the symptoms suffered by the afflicted, those who accused their neighbors of bewitching them. Though this interpretation of the Salem episode is fascinating, the book itself is extremely problematic, fraught with historical errors, inconsistencies, contradictions, conjecture, and a very selective use of the evidence.
Carlson begins her study with the theory that the afflicted among Salem's residents exhibited symptoms identical to those of individuals infected during the worldwide epidemic of......
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