Insanity : modern views as to its nature and treatment : a portion of the Morison lectures on insanity, delivered in 1879 / by W.T. Gairdner, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow.

  • William Tennant Gairdner
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity : modern views as to its nature and treatment : a portion of the Morison lectures on insanity, delivered in 1879 / by W.T. Gairdner, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    C.—Christianity, Witchcraft, and Demoniacal Possession. The Roman Catholic church has, of course, the first responsi- bility for this, as for many other monstrous outgrowths of human error and ignorance, engrafted by the abject terrors of some of her votaries, and by the love of dominion of others, on the religion which alone and above all the faiths of the world, recognises the human spirit as absolutely free within the realm of conscience. But earnest Protestants will do well to consider their own case before they fling the first stone. Let any one read in sequence, the admirable work of Reginald Scot, published in 1584, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (about which I shall have more to say in a subsequent page in this Appendix, p. 60), and then follow up this most enlightened and most Christian, as well as Protestant treatise, by an investigation into the doings and sayings of King James, in connection with his only too successful reply to Wier and Scot, A Treatise on Demonologie, at the close of the century; then let him read the narratives in some detail of the hideous cruelties that marked the course of the next hundred years both in England and Scotland, hounded on (especially in the latter country) by all the machinery of a thoroughly and even severely Protestant and Calvinistic inquisition; and he will find that there is but little to choose between Catholic priests in the fifteenth century, and Puritan or ultra-Protestant presby- ters in the seventeenth. Even in Massachusetts, the very home of Puritan fi-eedom and enlightenment, the holy war against witchcraft was, if possible, more stupid, and at the same time, more convinced and bloodthirsty than in Scotland, where the state of opinion that produced it has been reflected for all time in the work of a professor of Philosophy (!) in the University of Glasgow. See Satan's Invisible World Dis- covered ; or, a choice collection of modern relations, proving evidently against the Saducees, and Atheists of this present age, that there are devils, spirits, witches, and apparitions from authentic records, attestations of famous witnesses, and undoubted verity. By Mr. George Sinclar, late Professor of Philosophy in the Colledge of Glasgow. Edinburgh, 16S5. (Reprinted in a handsome edition, with prefatory notice and supplement, by Thomas George Stevenson, 1871.) Witch-finding and Witch Prosecutions in Scotland. The raw material of a Witch, medically observed — Case. Historical Remarks. Sir George Mackenzie. Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft.—Witch-finding, or witch-pricking, became a trade, and a set of mercenary vagabonds roamed about
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