Margaret Jones

Margaret Jones practiced medicine in colonial Massachusetts at a time when formal medical institutions were scarce and community healers -many of them women - were essential to survival.

Working as a midwife and herbal practitioner, she treated patients using plant-based remedies, observation, and hands-on care. Her treatments were known to be effective - sometimes dramatically so - which drew both reliance and scrutiny.

As professional medicine began shifting toward male-dominated, credentialed authority, unlicensed female healers increasingly came under suspicion. Jones’s knowledge, diagnostic confidence, and willingness to speak plainly about her patients’ conditions were recast not as skill, but as threat.

In 1648, she became the first person executed for witchcraft in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Court records cited her medical practice itself as evidence - claiming her touch had unnatural power, her remedies worked “beyond ordinary means,” and those who challenged her sometimes worsened or died.

Her trial reveals a turning point: the moment women’s community-based medical authority began to be criminalized as institutional medicine consolidated power.

Margaret Jones did not leave written texts or formal institutions behind.
What remains is the record of a healer whose effectiveness - once trusted - became grounds for execution as control over medicine changed hands.