rst appeared as crawling under furniture, using "sundry odd Postures and Antick Gestures" and saying "foolish, ridiculous" things. Twelve years old Abigail Williams, for example, charged around the Parris house, flapping her arms like wings and crying "Whish, Whish" .She was, in other words, playing. In a society that sought to prevent "physical spontaneity", such behavior would usually be seen as misbehavior. However, with a few exceptions such as John Proctor's disciplining of his servant Mary Warren, the afflicted were treated as ill rather than delinquent. In part this was because their actions were seen as involuntary: Lawson saw Abigail as being "hurryed with Violence" by unseen hands. In part it was because the afflicted mostly came from religious households, and the parents did not want to believe they had failed to produce properly religious children or servants. In part it was because women were seen as "The Weaker Vessel" and thus more susceptible than men to illnesses if it had been mostly males who were afflicted, likely they would have been seen as truants. There were two natural illnesses known at the time that could explain the "fits" or convulsions typical of the afflicted's affect: epilepsy and "the strangulation of the mother," or hysteria. At the time, both were wastebasket categories, less diseases than labels for sets of symptoms: epilepsy could refer to just about any kind of convulsive disease, while a diagnosis of "the mother" simply meant that the patient was a woman and the diagnoser was baffled or lazy. Both were explicitly thought connected to the supernatural: Cotton Mather wrote in his 1724 medical treatise The Angel of Bethesda, that epilepsy can sometimes weaken the mind enough that evil spirits can "Strangely Insinuate themselves into the Malady . . .. Some of the Demoniacks in the Gospels, were Epilepticks" In 1664, Thomas Brown wrote that "the mother" could be "heightened to a great excess by the subt...
