Jean Charles Bucknill (pictured below), superintendent of the Devon County Asylum, found among his patients a woman admitted to the institution in 1859, with her lunacy certificate stating the evidence of her delusion: “She believes she is surrounded by robbers and that her house has been partially pulled down by them.” However, Bucknill made inquiries and discovered that she was the local “wise woman” and that several local “superstitious brutes”, as he put it, had indeed entered her home and stabbed her, in the belief that if they drew her blood, she would lose her power over them. Her hut, which she had built herself on a common, had then been partially pulled down by these same men. Thus her two “delusions” were nothing of the sort — they were factual.

She had been brought into the asylum badly scarred and dressed in rags, which upon inspection were found to conceal 30 pounds and some shillings, which were her earnings from her witching trade.

Bucknill discharged her from the asylum, and the last he heard of the “funny old hag” was that she had left her parish as she did not feel safe, and believed that the local Overseers Of The Poor (ie the welfare officers) were keen to get their hands on her cash. In her new parish, she was carrying on “a thriving trade in the mysteries of the black art”, in Bucknill’s words.

Bucknill told this tale to warn medical men that it was important to bear in mind the persistence of genuine beliefs in witchcraft, particularly in rural communities. Elsewhere, Bucknill expressed the view that doctors may wish to bear in mind class antagonisms when attempting diagnosis and cure of insanity among paupers. “If the patient is much below the social rank of the physician, assistance may often be obtained from persons of the patient’s own position and modes of thought. A man whose ideas revolve in the narrow circle of a peasant’s uncultivated mind will often put himself into a mental posture of silent and sullen antagonism to all persons whom he considers above him, while he will expand and communicate freely to his equals and ordinary associates.”