"Some researchers have traced Huntington's back along family lines to the infamous witch trials in 17th century America - in Salem and elsewhere. They have speculated that choreic women, afflicted by spastic movements and uncontrollable mental disorders, were tried and sometimes executed as witches." source

"Huntington's Disease was first described in 1872 when a 22 year old American doctor, George Huntington, read a paper 'On Chorea' to a medical academy in Middleport, Ohio. His paper was subsequently published in the Medical and Surgical Reporter of Philadelphia and the hereditary disorder he described became known as Huntington's Chorea. The word "chorea" is derived from Latin and Greek words meaning chorus or a group of dancers. It was applied to a number of so-called 'dancing disorders' which sprang up in the Middle Ages. In those days individuals with the involuntary muscle jerks and twitches characteristic of HD were often thought to be possessed by devils. It is believed that at least one of the alleged 'witches' executed in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s was a victim of Huntington's Disease." source

"Its clear hereditary nature, and the established fact that the condition is rarely if ever sporadic led quickly to searches for the original Huntington disease person or community. The most famous, interesting and quite possibly misleading of these efforts was led by Vessie, who in 1932 suggested that the disorder may have originated in Bures, a small Suffolk village in England. Choreics from this locale were sent from England, probably with the aid of paid witch hunters, to the Massachusetts Colony where their disease and social discord arising from it are adequately recorded in a continuous variety of historic records. Fanning out through New England and later Connecticut, females in family lines became victims of the New England Witch Hunts, led by two then recent graduates of the Harvard School of Divinity, the Reverends Cotton Mather and Samuel Paris. These men and their followers believed that the genetically-afflicted likes of the Mercy Disbrough, the famous Groton witch, were possessed by the devil and in their involuntary throes, doing a parody of Christ upon the Cross, an act rewarded with the dismal pageantry of public immolation." source

"The genetic transmission of Huntington's disease became evident when it was discovered that practically all patients with this disease on the East coast of the United States were descendants of two ancestors born in Suffolk, England, who emigrated to Salem, Massachusetts in 1630. In all likelihood, several of the apparently deranged women in Salem who were executed as witches were actually exhibiting symptoms of the disease." from Chapter 30 of Essentials of Neural Science and Behavior.

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