Even though vampire cases turn up in several regions across the country, the “Transylvania of America” remained non-Puritan New England—from the outlying towns in Rhode Island and Eastern Connecticut, up the Connecticut River Valley into Vermont, New Hampshire, and southern Maine, and into Upstate New York. The people of this “other New England”—some of them Puritan outcasts or those who became disillusioned with that suffocating religion—were not notably religious in an orthodox sense. Occupying philosophical as well as geographical margins, they were open to a magic world view and participated in various hybrid religions that were unofficial combinations of Christian beliefs and folk practices. (However, an account from Essex County, Massachusetts, the home of Salem Village, notorious for its witch trials in the late seventeenth century, establishes that vampire practices were not entirely excluded from areas of strong Puritan heritage.)

New Englanders long relied on self-treatment and treatment by folk healers, drawing on the lore of herbs and readily available household ingredients passed down in their communities for generations. But they were also aware of other medical traditions. Beginning in in the eighteenth century, itinerant healers—many originally from Germany and Eastern Europe—worked a circuit from New Jersey and Pennsylvania into New England. They set up shop in town, advertised in local newspapers and broadsides (most of their ads included testimonies from cured patients), and moved on when business dropped off or, not infrequently, when run out of town by officials or dissatisfied clients. One of my recently discovered cases pushes the earliest known exhumation in America back to 1784, firmly establishing vampire activity in the era when these foreign, “quack doctors” were plying their trade in the Northeast. Although this unofficial culture of occult beliefs and folk magic has received little attention from historians, it appears to have influenced many, if not most, Americans, beginning in colonial times and continuing through the nineteenth century.

American medicine in the early eighteenth century was unecrtain and changing. Astrology, religion, folk cures, and several kinds of medical systems provided alternative, often competing, approaches to dealing with sickness and healing. The ancient Greek doctrine advanced by Hippocrates remained unchallenged: the human body was regulated by the interplay of the four “humors” of phlegm, choler, bile and blood. To restore balance and good health when these fluids or vapors got out of balance, doctors would flush the digestive tract with purgatives and emetics or bleed the patient. The concept of “vitalism” held that blood, the “paramount humor,” contained the essence, or vital spirit, of the creature in which it flowed. Well into the nineteenth century in America, a physician’s duties required little, if any, formal training. The following list of self-proclaimed specialists suggests the inclusive and unsettled nature of the healing profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: physicians, surgeons, oculists, aurists, bonesetters, animal healers, botanic/Indian healers, pharmaceutical peddlers, medical electricians and apparatus healers, cancer curers, and dentists and surgeon-dentists. Whether treated or not, illnesses ran their natural course and most of the afflicted survived. In that regard, Voltaire (1694-1778) is often quoted, “The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”