And can we issue a condemnation of the people who hanged that nice old lady who lives down the street because her chicken laid a funny-looking egg and that meant she was a witch?...

The standardized text of CA State Curriculum said that many male doctors didn't appreciate the female nurses taking away a lot of their business/$.

But there's this tendency to try to find current reasons for historical events. The population was certainly under 3000 for the greater Salem area at the time.

There weren't "many male doctors." Those present probably would have resented quackery, as they'd have viewed it. (We'd view them all as quacks these days.)

In the 1990s there was a school at which many of the students said that the teachers and administrators abused them sexually. The details were astounding, the memories of the children clear. One kid made an accusation, and the claims spread. Investigators provided possible details that the kids picked up. Memories were constructed. The adults were tried and convicted and sentenced to prison. Nobody wanted to seriously call the kids liars, and they were kids. Much later somebody dug a bit deeper--the kids were all telling falsehoods. Some admitted it. Some didn't, but their details were impossible.

If age-discrimination by minors was a thing that we were concerned about, that's the label we'd give it. Instead, it was a small child afraid of getting in trouble who said something amiss, and it snowballed from there.

Ergotism is another possible explanation, but isn't "relevant." Mass hysteria from stress is possible. Or perhaps somebody took a sermon on witchcraft to heart in a religious community, and somebody re-remembered things because of a personal offence. Nobody wanted to call them liars, and the community's collective memory gelled around that explanation.

In my social deviance class (so was it called) we read a paper from the '60s about a poor guy who was recruited as a research subject. A research aide was hired as the (female) secretary in the company office. Then one day somebody "let slip" that the guy was a homosexual. Within a few weeks everybody had always known that from the clear signs--his behavior, the way he acted around women, the way he acted around men. The secretary observed all. When they had whatever data they wanted, they announced it was all a ruse. The guy wasn't gay, he had been happily married with kids and that wasn't a put-on, he wasn't in the closet. Thing is, having re-formed all their memories and explanations, the guy eventually had to quit and move with his family to another city. This wasn't anti-gay discrimination: This was how people interact to reshape their own memories and explanations to form a narrative.

Perhaps anti-gay discrimination was the reason for the ostracism the guy suffered. But the way the events for the previous year were made to fit a new, scurrilous narrative was stunning. Apply that to Salem.

Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. It is clear from the info laid out in the book that the accusations were often used to settle old scores and as part of a land grab as, in most cases, all the accused witches possessions were seized. Highly recommended read for those interested in this episode of our history. My ancestor, John Proctor , was a rich man who had everything seized from his children after they hung him...even the last pot to cook in.

Maybe I'm just going by what I saw in The Crucible.