In real life, witch trials were conducted with almost zero physical evidence and a majority of hearsay. And those that had physical evidence that was not made up by the accusers themselves often came from ignorance: midwives, healers, female doctors, and any other accomplished woman who wasn't protected by a majority of her community or by her class.
Rosemary Kennedy is a prime example of the control men had over the women in their lives and the lack of knowledge into her condition. She was considered unruly, dumb, and reckless and because her father couldn't control her behavior, he had her institutionalized and given the top treatment of the time: a lobotomy. In reality, she had a mental disability due to the doctor not being able to deliver her right away, she was prone to seizures, and she might have been bipolar. Lobotomies were popular for many things but at the time, a husband could commit his wife to an institution like this on just his word alone and she might have been forced to have the procedure on nothing more than nit wanting to listen to her husband.
It's a problem still prevalent in the healthcare field today, especially the US, where a woman's pain is only considered relevant when her husband agrees with her. We also have a lack of research into any demographic other than a white male. If we hadn't persecuted these women in the past because men and women were jealous of their craft, imagine how much farther we would be in supporting women's healthcare.
Instead, we are barely away from the notion that hysteria (which she could also be institutionalized for) is when the woman's womb is traveling around her body and that women's basketball was played so that all the players on the team had a fixed spot on the court except one on each side that was "sacrificing her womb to fall out" to run the ball around the court. People believed this all the way up through the 60s and Title VIII was the thing to ultimately dispel this myth.
They thought she was a witch???? Where is the evidence?? Who told her she was a witch?? Accusations