The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Katherine Howe’s first novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, follows Harvard graduate student Connie, who fatefully exhumes a mystery that potentially carries implications on both the present and historical understanding of the famous Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials.

The prologue opens with a scene from the distant past. A woman attempts to cure a sickly child by referring to a set of remedies in a book she carries, but all of the medicines fail and the girl dies. The woman suggests to the girl’s father that girl had been bewitched, enraging the father.

The narrative shifts to the present—1991 in the novel—and readers are introduced to Connie Goodwin, a PhD student in American Colonial history at Harvard who has recently passed her oral exams. She is under immense pressure from her program adviser, Dr. Manning Chilton, to settle into a dissertation topic; she often releases her stress upon her own understudy, Thomas.



While preparing to spend the summer finalizing the direction of her dissertation, Dr. Chilton suggests to her a troubling question: what if those executed during the seventeenth-century witch hunts actually were witches? Connie quickly scoffs at the idea, but the notion continues to haunt her subconsciously.

Just as she’s settling into the reality of her PhD candidacy, Connie’s plans are stalled when her mother, Grace, calls from New Mexico, pleading with her to oversee the restoration and sale of her grandmother’s abandoned home in Marblehead, a town near Salem. Slightly perturbed, Connie capitulates, remaining hopeful that the ordeal may somehow aid her in her research.

The house, to Connie’s chagrin, is completely overgrown with vegetation and in need of more care than she had initially imagined. Her grandmother, Sophia, had lived in the house as recently as thirty years before Connie’s arrival, but no other occupants had followed and thus the house had fallen into extreme disrepair. With no electricity, running water, or telephone service, Connie and her dog, Arlo, are forced to spend the night by the light of the home’s only oil lamp.



Restless, Connie ventures downstairs to peruse her late grandmother’s library. She picks up a seventeenth-century Bible; it suddenly flings itself open and burns her hands. A key falls out of it, and she finds a fragment of yellowed paper attached to it containing only the words ‘Deliverance Dane.’

Neglecting her housekeeping duties, Connie begins a quest to uncover the meaning of the mysterious fragment. She traces the name back to the 1692 witch trials and discovers that Deliverance Dane, one among the many Salem townsfolk accused of witchcraft, was an apothecary of sorts who kept a large almanac of ‘physicks,’ or herbal remedies, that has since been lost. (Readers will recognize that the apothecary in the interchapters is none other than the historical Deliverance Dane; the alternating past narrative reveals the context of her accusation.)

Connie, recognizing the academic value in a primary source like the physick book, sets out to locate it in order to spin it toward her dissertation. As the search consumes her, the book only seems to become more elusive. She concurrently meets Sam, a former grad student and steeplejack-by-trade, with whom she strikes up a romance. Eventually, she finds the book and discovers that she, too, has the ability to do magic.



Meanwhile, Grace and Dr. Chilton pressure Connie. Her mother accuses her of failing to see things through with the house, and Dr. Chilton begins to reveal his sinister ambitions by prodding Connie to bring him the book, which he intends to use for his own academic presentation.

As the story reaches its climax, Sam falls gravely ill, and Connie, using the physick book, is the only one able to save him. Recognizing that the book could become a serious problem if it falls into the wrong hands, she tosses it into a fire and looks on as it’s consumed in the flames.

Reaching beyond the normal haunts of contemporary fantasy, Howe uses The Physick Book to explore the apparent tension present during periods of great cultural transition. Deliverance lived during the flowering of the Enlightenment but before it had truly rooted itself into the fabric of Western society; thus, superstition and mysticism were able to overcome reason during the Salem trials.



Connie, too, lives in an era of transition: the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the development of computer and information technology—primarily the arrival of the internet—but web-based networking would still need a few years to become an essential part of twenty-first-century society. Her card-catalog-based research and lack of access to telecommunication at her grandmother’s house is juxtaposed with her uploading of the book’s contents on the web before she burns it.

The book also explores the strain between faith and sensory experience, present in Connie’s initial skepticism toward the reality of magic and her eventual ability to practice it. Similarly, the book’s central question—what if the accused in Salem really were witches?—explores the role of memory and the privilege of the historian in interpreting events that were much more complex than meets the eye.