John Cotta

"A True Discovery of the Empericke with the Fugitive Physition and Quacksalver, who Display their Banners upon Posts." Title page, published 1617

John Cotta (1575–1650)[1][2] was a physician in England and author of books and other texts on medicine and witchcraft.

Life

He was a native of Coventry, and his mother is believed to be Susannah Winthrop, aunt of John Winthrop.[3] In 1590 he was admitted a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, and five years later, after taking the B.A. degree, he moved to Corpus Christi College where, in the following year, he proceeded to the M.A. degree.[4] He obtained the M.D. degree in 1603, and then took up residence at Northampton, where, through the patronage and influence of Sir William Tate, he acquired a considerable professional practice.[5]

Works

Cotta wrote extensively about quack doctors, and exposed several in his book Ignorant Practisers of Physicke (1612). He put a traditional Galenist argument, to the effect that experience alone of was of limited value to medical practitioners.[6] With his medical colleague James Hart from Northampton, he argued the case for learned medicine (the early modern tradition descending from Galen) and the requirement of a university degree for its effective use.[7]

He believed in evil spirits, sorcerers and magic. He begins his book The Triall of Witch-craft (1616) by stating that these phenomena were beyond human knowledge, and that only by conjecture and inference is it possible to understand these events. He did warn readers that many suspected witches were really imposters, or unwitting agents of the devil. He presents as evidence that evil spirits exist the standard classical history and biblical texts. He even uses reason to dismiss the "water test" for witches, where a purported witch would be submerged in water, and if she had renounced her baptism and was a true witch, the water would reject her and she would float. Cotta did still agree with others like Reginald Scot that magic was clearly a factor in day-to-day life because many diseases displayed symptoms they could not understand, or did not respond to standard remedies. Also he asserted that eyewitness accounts were sufficient to charge a suspected witch with witchcraft.[8]

Cotta wrote in The Triall of Witch-craft (1616):

Hence as Wítches doe strange and supernaturall workes, and truly vnto reason worthy of wonder; so the Impostor doth things voide of accomptable reason, in shadow, shew, and seeming onely supernaturall, wondred and admired. And hence it commeth to passe, that with vndiscerning mindes, they are sometimes mistaken and confounded .[nb 1] one for another.

Nickname in Maine

The name "John Cotta" was given as a nickname by early English settlers to an individual of the indigenous peoples they met in the Damariscotta River area in what was to become the state of Maine in the United States. This was because John Cotta was renowned as expert in witchcraft, in the context that it was felt by the settlers that the natives practised a form of religion that could be classed as witchcraft.[9]

Selected publications

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ [See Reginald Scot in his discouerie of Witchcraft, where in regard of the seeming likenesse of Impostures and Witchcraft, erroneously he confoundeth them as one and the selfe-same sinne.]

References

  1. ↑ Dates of death and birth taken from Sona Rosa Burstein, Demonology and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Folklore, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Mar. 1956), pp. 16–33. J-stor
  2. ↑ The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography record gives his birth and death information as (1575?–1627/8).
  3. ↑ Elmer, Peter. "Cotta, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/6393. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ↑ "Cotta, John (CT588J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  5. ↑ Chisholm 1911.
  6. ↑ Todd Howard James Pettigrew, Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: medical narratives on the early modern English stage (2007), p. 35; Google Books.
  7. ↑ Don Bates, Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions (1995), p. 162; Google Books.
  8. ↑ Chapter 6, Witch-hunting, Harold V. Routh, "The Advent of Modern Thought in Popular Literature: Witch Controversy; Pamphleteers" ch. 16, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, v. 7, "English: Cavalier and Puritan", Ed. A. W. Ward & A. R. Waller. N.Y.: Putnam, 1907–21. Section 6: Witch Hunting. (text version on Bartleby.com)
  9. ↑ Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Essex County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692, Emerson W. Baker and James Kences, Maine History, volume 40, number 3, Fall 2001 (pp. 159–189)
Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Vian, Alsager Richard (1887). "Cotta, John". In Stephen, Leslie. Dictionary of National Biography. 12. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 288–289. 

Further reading

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