Mar 11, 2024 07:33 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 11, 2024 07:48 PM by C C.)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ma...ie-feeling
EXCERPTS: . . . Prior to Louis Pasteur’s invention of a vaccine in 1884, there were precious few treatments for rabies, preventive or otherwise.
One was cauterization—known as St. Hubert’s Key (after the patron saint of hunters). Usually a piece of iron in the shape of a nail or a cross, it was heated white hot and pressed against the wound. While it seems barbaric and superstitious, at least in theory it could work if carried out quickly enough after an infected bite, since it has a chance of killing the virus at the site of the infection before it begins traveling up the nervous system.
[...] The other widely used remedy was the mad stone, used largely the way it is described in Adam Rarely’s story: fresh milk, adherence to the wound, boiled in milk to remove the poison, reapplied until it would no longer stick. (A variation on this treatment, in which fur from the rabid animal itself was pressed against the wound, ultimately gave us the expression “the hair of the dog that bit you.”) It could only be used on humans and was temperamental in the way that magical things are. In addition to concern about charging for its use, if a mad stone was applied to animals, it would lose its power to heal people. Importantly, the patient had go to the stone—it could never be brought to the patient. There’s no definitive account of mad stones or how they were used, just newspaper articles, guides of folk remedies, and legend.
Perhaps the most famous person to seek out this cure was Abraham Lincoln. In 1852, Lincoln traveled with his son Robert from Springfield, Illinois, to Terre Haute, Indiana, after Robert had been bitten by a dog. As Edgar Lee Masters recorded in his 1931 biography Lincoln the Man, “He believed in the madstone, and one of his sisters-in-law related that Lincoln took one of his boys to Terre Haute, Indiana, to have the stone applied to a wound inflicted by a dog on the boy.” In 1936, historian Max Ehrmann attempted to verify this story, and found numerous secondhand witnesses who testified that Lincoln had indeed made the trip for this purpose, though he could not verify whose mad stone it had been.
Describing what a mad stone is supposed to do is easy; describing what it is turns out to be much harder. They came in any number of shapes and sizes: black, brown, gray, shades in between. They ranged in size from a several inches to not much larger than a pumpkin seed. Different thicknesses and widths, innumerable shapes—the only defining feature the stories share is their ability to cure this specific, deadly, viral infection.
[...] Most of the stories agree that mad stones were not geological in origin, but came from animals. Some say the stomach, some the head or neck or heart or shoulder. Some claim they were found in moose, others elk or buffalo, or deer—particularly white deer or otherwise rare ruminants.
[...] The mad stone, in other words, is a variation on the bezoar: a real phenomenon that occurs in ruminants whereby a mass of swallowed matter is compacted into a small, hard orb that is passed through the animal’s digestive tract. The word “bezoar” comes from the Persian for “antidote,” and such objects were long believed to have medicinal properties. In fact, modern chemical analyses have shown that certain bezoars, when immersed in a solution that includes arsenic, can indeed extract the poison from the liquid.
[...] Lincoln’s son Robert lived to be 82 years old—a mad stone success story. Most believed that a functional mad stone was infallible—they always worked, if operated properly. The few times a mad stone failed, it was because of a shortcoming of the patient...
[...] Of course, all of this seems dubious now. Any kind of poison- or pathogen-sucking capillary function is impossible to replicate a scientific environment... (MORE - missing details)
The "mad stone from 1949" anecdote ... https://youtu.be/IkQyJLBtzj0
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IkQyJLBtzj0
EXCERPTS: . . . Prior to Louis Pasteur’s invention of a vaccine in 1884, there were precious few treatments for rabies, preventive or otherwise.
One was cauterization—known as St. Hubert’s Key (after the patron saint of hunters). Usually a piece of iron in the shape of a nail or a cross, it was heated white hot and pressed against the wound. While it seems barbaric and superstitious, at least in theory it could work if carried out quickly enough after an infected bite, since it has a chance of killing the virus at the site of the infection before it begins traveling up the nervous system.
[...] The other widely used remedy was the mad stone, used largely the way it is described in Adam Rarely’s story: fresh milk, adherence to the wound, boiled in milk to remove the poison, reapplied until it would no longer stick. (A variation on this treatment, in which fur from the rabid animal itself was pressed against the wound, ultimately gave us the expression “the hair of the dog that bit you.”) It could only be used on humans and was temperamental in the way that magical things are. In addition to concern about charging for its use, if a mad stone was applied to animals, it would lose its power to heal people. Importantly, the patient had go to the stone—it could never be brought to the patient. There’s no definitive account of mad stones or how they were used, just newspaper articles, guides of folk remedies, and legend.
Perhaps the most famous person to seek out this cure was Abraham Lincoln. In 1852, Lincoln traveled with his son Robert from Springfield, Illinois, to Terre Haute, Indiana, after Robert had been bitten by a dog. As Edgar Lee Masters recorded in his 1931 biography Lincoln the Man, “He believed in the madstone, and one of his sisters-in-law related that Lincoln took one of his boys to Terre Haute, Indiana, to have the stone applied to a wound inflicted by a dog on the boy.” In 1936, historian Max Ehrmann attempted to verify this story, and found numerous secondhand witnesses who testified that Lincoln had indeed made the trip for this purpose, though he could not verify whose mad stone it had been.
Describing what a mad stone is supposed to do is easy; describing what it is turns out to be much harder. They came in any number of shapes and sizes: black, brown, gray, shades in between. They ranged in size from a several inches to not much larger than a pumpkin seed. Different thicknesses and widths, innumerable shapes—the only defining feature the stories share is their ability to cure this specific, deadly, viral infection.
[...] Most of the stories agree that mad stones were not geological in origin, but came from animals. Some say the stomach, some the head or neck or heart or shoulder. Some claim they were found in moose, others elk or buffalo, or deer—particularly white deer or otherwise rare ruminants.
[...] The mad stone, in other words, is a variation on the bezoar: a real phenomenon that occurs in ruminants whereby a mass of swallowed matter is compacted into a small, hard orb that is passed through the animal’s digestive tract. The word “bezoar” comes from the Persian for “antidote,” and such objects were long believed to have medicinal properties. In fact, modern chemical analyses have shown that certain bezoars, when immersed in a solution that includes arsenic, can indeed extract the poison from the liquid.
[...] Lincoln’s son Robert lived to be 82 years old—a mad stone success story. Most believed that a functional mad stone was infallible—they always worked, if operated properly. The few times a mad stone failed, it was because of a shortcoming of the patient...
[...] Of course, all of this seems dubious now. Any kind of poison- or pathogen-sucking capillary function is impossible to replicate a scientific environment... (MORE - missing details)
The "mad stone from 1949" anecdote ... https://youtu.be/IkQyJLBtzj0