Witches and medicine

The accounts of witchcraft trials held in the sixteenth century tell of the use of magic and medicine by women referred to as 'witches'.
In many cases witches were healers who were condemned simply because they operated outside the control of and in opposition to the lay and religious authorities. They were condemned for heresy and not because their treatments were shown to be dangerous.
In those times curing sickness that official medicine was unable to treat meant entering into the field of the supernatural and therefore committing the sin of heresy.

The knowledge to transform and use medicinal plants gave witches a power that the Church and State wished to minimise.
Witches were well aware of the therapeutic use of medicinal plants and famous botanists like Mattioli and Durante confirmed the properties of certain plants that they used in their preparations.

Often the use of plants was accompanied by that of animals or parts of animals. Healing witches always associated magical rites with the ministration of their herbal preparations with the aim of driving out the evil in the body of their patient.

In addition to plants still used today, witches often used others which, if taken in huge doses, could be toxic or hallucinogenic, and thus able to alter the individual's state of consciousness: for example, the highly toxic wolf's bane, which is capable of paralysing the nerve endings, deadly nightshade and thorn apple are all recognised as being powerful hallucinogenics.