[Footnote 58: The learned "practitioner in physick," Mr. William Drage, in his "Treatise of Diseases from Witchcraft," published Lond. 1668, 4to. p. 22, recommends "birch" in such cases, "as a specifical medicine, antipathetical to demons." One can only lament that this valuable remedy was not vigorously applied in the present instance, as well as in most others in which these juvenile sufferers appear. I doubt whether, in the whole Materia Medica, a more powerful _Lamia-fuge_ could have been discovered, or one which would have been more universally successful, if applied perseveringly, whenever the suspicious symptoms recurred. The following is, however, Drage's great panacea in these cases, a mode of treatment which must have been vastly popular, judging from its extensive adoption in all parts of the country: "_Punish the witch, threaten to hang her if she helps not the sick, scratch her and fetch blood. When she is cast into prison the sick are some time delivered, some time he or she (they are most females, most old women, and most poor,) must transfer the disease to other persons, sometimes to a dog, or horse, or cow, &c. Threaten her and beat her to remove it._"--Drage, p. 23.]
The name of Margaret Johnson does not appear in Edmund Robinson's examination. Whether accused or not, the opportunity was too alluring to be lost by a personage full of matter, being like old Mause Headrigg, "as a bottle that lacketh vent," and too desirous of notoriety, to let slip such an occasion. She made, on the 2nd of March following, before the same justices who had taken Robinson's examination, the following confession, which must have been considered a most instructive one by those who were in search of some short _vade mecum_ of the statistics of witchcraft in Pendle:--