Black cats, ladders, broken mirrors: all of them are bad luck. Unless you evaluate them under double-blind trials, then you notice that it's just superstition, irrational creeds that are based in a magic belief that the supernatural governs our lives. How lucky we are! (no pun intended) Reason comes to eradicate these nonsensical ideas: If you walk under a ladder, just try to not push it. If a mirror breaks, do not pick up the broke glass in a clumsy way. About the cats... well, nobody understands cats.
picture added totally out of context of the paragraph because steemit does not allow to setup the thumbnail... yet. (but look how cool it is!)
Science is the tool we have to shed some light upon the rooms superstition leaves in darkness, yet sometimes light arrives a bit too late and is only useful to find the corpses that ignorance leaves behind. As it happened in 1976 when 284 years later, it was found that the 8 children that were "bewitched" -and were the cause of the execution of 24 people in Salem, USA- were not possessed by demons but by "ergot": A fungi that grows in rye and some other related species. And since this small town did not like neither witches or light food intoxication... they burned them all.
A small discovery.
A psychologist and investigator of the California University, Linnda R. Caporael, described in an article for the Science magazine the possible relation between an epidemic disease transmitted by the Claviceps purpurea and the cases of "Salem's witches". The Claviceps, also known as ergot, in a fungi that grows in cereals, particularly in rye.
"Ergotism or long term poisoning by this, is the result of the consumption of contaminated bread (at that time rye bread was the common bread, unlike today's wheat). Women children and pregnant women are the vulnerable groups. The effects are accumulative and take up to two years to fully develop". The symptoms include: hallucinations, convulsions (seizures), arterial compression, acute burning sensation and gangrene in the extremities. One of the alkaloids present in ergot is LSA and another one, ergoline, from which lysergic acid derives from, or LSD-25; commonly known as "boomers", "acid", "Purple haze", "pane" (in the best of cases, since; generally speaking what they sell you in the street has a lot of things but LSD). Resuming, Ergotism is like having an infection that releases LSD into your system; sort of, not the same one, yet a very similar compound. This compound is so much that it can give you a "bad trip" along with seizures and gangrene (the key difference with LSD, that does not have the mentioned secondary effects). Horrible, yes. Witchcraft, not at all.
What is it?
From the responsible compound (ergotamine), today we know that we use it as one of the few effective medicines against migraine, and that from it we derive what we know as lysergic acid, that was synthesized in 1943 by Albert Hofmann, we also know that it had a direct relation with the symptoms the children in Salem had.
A huge discovery.
As he was crystallizing his first batch of LSD-25 the doctor's fingers absorbed the substance, so he was forced to interrupt his task; as he informed, he has having "a very stimulated imagination" in a state "similar to a dream", where he could see kaleidoscopic figures with his eyes closed, because the ambient light disturbed him. After this (un?)fortunate incident, the chemist decided to be his own test subject.
His plan was simple: Get high for the sake of science. Hofmann consumed a pretty high dose of lysergic acid. How high? 250 micro-grams. And that, how much is it? The minimum psychoactive dose of LSD is between 10 and 25 micro-grams (the normal amount in a boomer is 50 to 100 micro grams). What happened? Hofmann took a trip (literally, he was so "REKT" that asked to be taken home) and when he returned he described the effects he experimented: loss of will, unable to talk or move, hallucinations, photophobia and sensation of imminent death. What Hofmann experimented lasted a few hours. Salem's girls lived under that, adding the previously stated symptoms. Now we should ask the key question: Was Doctor Hofmann bewitched? Possessed? Of course not.
What happened at Salem.
Salem, 1691: Some Massachusetts' Doctors found 8 girls with some chronic symptoms: Mary Warren, Mary Walcot, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam, Susannah Sheldon and Betty Parris. When they were not able to find any biologic reason for those symptoms, doctors recurred to superstition.
Diagnostic: Bewitched. We R the bezt Doctorz.
The anger that always comes with ignorance did not take long to spread around town, it landed over a slave that was taking care of two of the girls: Tituba. She was accused of witchcraft -also two elderly women in town that nobody could stand-. The worse, Tituba admitted that she had magic powers. Unhappy with 3 accused, since the girls were still bewitched, in February 1692 a special jury was formed and it detained 200 people for the same accusations: Witchcraft.
Oh yes, bewitch me please!
The clever Trials.
The jury, to dictate their decisions, used nothing else but the missing "spectral evidence" -the hallucinations the girls had, and the fail-proof "touch evidence" -that consisted in: the seizures stop as on of the suspected "witches" touches a convulsing child-. There were clinical registries that described the disease back in 1962, and the catholic church actually opposed to give a sentence based on such limited evidence (yes, you read me right, the church actually was AGAINST superstitions, weird huh?), anyways the witch hunt kept going. The trials lasted one year, in that time 19 people died hanged, 4 in prison waiting for a sentence and a man died by "Peine forte et dure" a "method" that consisted on piling up rocks over the chest until the accused confessed... He was 80 years old... Pure violence, the kind I cannot make jokes about.
Judging science.
Unlike those trials Caporael's theory required solid proof and the backup of the scientific community to be accepted. Something that was not achieved easily. After publishing it, the magazine itself tagged it of "unreliable". Yet, not every one was against. The theory was later reinforced by a research done by the Historian Mary K. Matossian, that studied the effects if food poisoning and its consequences in social behavior.
In science nothing is absolute, theories are constantly exposed to trials, attempting to reach closer to the truth. Explaining what happened behind the scenes of Salem adds up a little grain of sand on the ocean of world's knowledge to help prevent future mistakes as those. Accepting the lock up and death sentence of innocent people based on superstition and the ignorance of powerful figures (in this case, the judges) is only increasing fear against the unknown. Witchcraft and Magic still exist in modern times but it is not eradicated with fire or hanging. Today, witchcraft comes in the shape of superstition. Superstition is fear, and fear can only be defeated with knowledge.
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