A Historical past of the Mad Stone, the One-Time ‘Remedy’ for Rabies
One August morning in 1923, a farmer in Missouri named Adam Hardly ever heard his pigs squealing and went out to research. He discovered an odd canine within the pen. As Hardly ever tried to defend his livestock, the canine attacked and bit him on the leg earlier than he might handle to kill it. Neighbors got here and rapidly concluded that the canine was rabid, which meant Hardly ever was in deep trouble. He rapidly received on his horse and rode 25 miles to the city of Buffalo to see the Reverend William Newton Sutton. Sutton, Hardly ever believed, was his solely hope for survival.
Sutton welcomed him in, had him sit down together with his leg elevated, and despatched his youngest son to fetch some contemporary milk. The reverend then went upstairs to retrieve his prized possession: a small, grayish-white stone. It had been in his household’s possession for many years, since a while after the Civil Warfare—an ancestor had acquired it from a German immigrant who’d settled in Arkansas. This stone, a mad stone, they believed, had the facility to treatment rabies.
Sutton had handled greater than a thousand individuals together with his mad stone, by no means charging anybody, because the objects had been generally mentioned to lose their efficacy in the event that they had been concerned in financial transactions. The healing energy of this rock was extensively identified; a number of docs had tried to purchase it from Sutton, who’d vowed by no means to promote it.
Sutton soaked the stone within the contemporary milk after which positioned it gently towards Hardly ever’s wound for 4 or 5 minutes. As Sutton eliminated his hand, the stone caught. This, so far as Sutton and Hardly ever had been involved, was proof constructive that the farmer had been contaminated with rabies. So that they waited.
After six hours, the stone fell away by itself. Sutton washed it, after which put it in a pot on the range that he crammed with milk. As he warmed the milk, a inexperienced scum fashioned on the floor, which, Sutton defined to Hardly ever, was the poison. Then the reverend positioned the stone again on the wound, and this time it caught for 2 hours. The method was repeated a 3rd time: 45 minutes. On the fourth attempt, the stone wouldn’t stick in any respect—Hardly ever was healed.
I first examine Hardly ever’s story in an article on mad stones by folklorist and musician Loman Cansler, who claims to have heard it firsthand from Sutton, and I’ve stored it in my recordsdata for a while now—a narrative that, at the same time as I’ve the means to elucidate what occurred, unsettles me in methods I can’t fairly clarify. There may be the strangeness of the ritual—the milk, the inexperienced scum, the ready. There may be the fear of the choice, the gradual, inevitable, painful loss of life by rabies. However principally there may be this unusual and anomalous object on the middle of it, inert however someway radiating energy.
For hundreds of years, rabies was one of the good scourges of humanity. A illness that famed Eleventh-century Muslim doctor and thinker Ibn Sina (generally identified within the West as Avicenna) as soon as known as that “severe and venomous melancholy,” it assaults the central nervous system, from the purpose of contact on a one-way path to the mind. Believed to be significantly prevalent in late summer time, significantly within the so-called Canine Days (July 24–August 24), when the canine star Sirius rises within the sky across the similar time as dawn, it terrified as a result of it was extremely seen and inevitably deadly, if considerably uncommon. (Between 1840 and 1906, New York Metropolis recorded not more than seven instances of rabies a 12 months, versus hundreds of deaths yearly from tuberculosis.)
Whereas rabies will be unfold by quite a few wild animals—from bats to raccoons—it’s lengthy been related to canine. As Invoice Wasik and Monica Murphy write of their examine of the illness, Rabid: A Cultural Historical past of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, “Rabies coevolved to reside within the canine, and the canine coevolved to reside with us.” The looks of rabies is an uncomfortable reminder of this proximity, this recognition that the worlds of the human and canine are coterminous. Past that, there’s one thing way more terrifying concerning the illness itself; the particular person exhibiting signs of rabies has, in some sense change into canine: more and more feral—much less human—because the illness takes its terrible toll. “The rabid chunk,” Wasik and Murphy write, “is the seen image of the animal infecting the human, of an sickness in a creature metamorphosing demonstrably into that very same sickness in an individual.” Rabies reminds us all how perilously skinny the barrier between human and animal actually is.
Previous to Louis Pasteur’s invention of a vaccine in 1884, there have been valuable few therapies for rabies, preventive or in any other case. One was cauterization—often known as St. Hubert’s Key (after the patron saint of hunters). Often a bit of iron within the form of a nail or a cross, it was heated white sizzling and pressed towards the wound. Whereas it appears barbaric and superstitious, at the very least in concept it might work if carried out rapidly sufficient after an contaminated chunk, because it has an opportunity of killing the virus on the website of the an infection earlier than it begins touring up the nervous system. In some cultures, when somebody would lastly start exhibiting signs of the illness—corresponding to hydrophobia, a extreme aversion to water, which is commonly how the illness is termed in older sources—family members would come collectively and throw a heavy blanket over them and smother them, not solely to hasten the loss of life but additionally so nobody particular person needed to really feel duty for the killing.
The opposite extensively used treatment was the mad stone, used largely the best way it’s described in Adam Hardly ever’s story: contemporary milk, adherence to the wound, boiled in milk to take away the poison, reapplied till it might now not stick. (A variation on this remedy, by which fur from the rabid animal itself was pressed towards the wound, finally gave us the expression “the hair of the canine that bit you.”) It might solely be used on people and was temperamental in the best way that magical issues are. Along with concern about charging for its use, if a mad stone was utilized to animals, it might lose its energy to heal individuals. Importantly, the affected person had go to the stone—it might by no means be dropped at the affected person. There’s no definitive account of mad stones or how they had been used, simply newspaper articles, guides of folks treatments, and legend.
Maybe probably the most well-known particular person to hunt out this treatment was Abraham Lincoln. In 1852, Lincoln traveled together with his son Robert from Springfield, Illinois, to Terre Haute, Indiana, after Robert had been bitten by a canine. As Edgar Lee Masters recorded in his 1931 biography Lincoln the Man, “He believed within the madstone, and considered one of his sisters-in-law associated that Lincoln took considered one of his boys to Terre Haute, Indiana, to have the stone utilized to a wound inflicted by a canine on the boy.” In 1936, historian Max Ehrmann tried to confirm this story, and located quite a few secondhand witnesses who testified that Lincoln had certainly made the journey for this objective, although he couldn’t confirm whose mad stone it had been.
Describing what a mad stone is meant to do is straightforward; describing what it is seems to be a lot more durable. They got here in any variety of styles and sizes: black, brown, grey, shades in between. They ranged in dimension from a a number of inches to not a lot bigger than a pumpkin seed. Completely different thicknesses and widths, innumerable shapes—the one defining characteristic the tales share is their means to treatment this particular, lethal, viral an infection.
A lot of the tales agree that mad stones weren’t geological in origin, however got here from animals. Some say the abdomen, some the pinnacle or neck or coronary heart or shoulder. Some declare they had been present in moose, others elk or buffalo, or deer—significantly white deer or in any other case uncommon ruminants. The New York Occasions gave a largely credulous account of them in Could 3, 1885, stating that mad stones had been mentioned “to be formations discovered within the bladders of deer and solely exist in these animals that reside in a excessive, dry local weather the place there may be not a full provide of water and the water drank is impregnated with limestone.” Normally, individuals believed that mad stones kind when a deer or different ruminant swallows a overseas substance that regularly change into coated within the abdomen with layers of hair, together with magnesia or phosphate of ammonia. As one supply defined, the mad stone was “a compact of Vegetable and Mucus Issues, and fashioned by a freak of nature within the small or second abdomen of a Hermaphrodite Deer, and so constructed with its innumerable cells that when utilized to the lacerated flesh, it adheres without delay and each cell workouts a suction energy, however doesn’t take in any substance besides Virus; as a result of the cells are too diminutive in dimension to absorb even blood, which is simply too coarse and hard to realize entrance.”
The mad stone, in different phrases, is a variation on the bezoar: an actual phenomenon that happens in ruminants whereby a mass of swallowed matter is compacted right into a small, arduous orb that’s handed by means of the animal’s digestive tract. The phrase “bezoar” comes from the Persian for “antidote,” and such objects had been lengthy believed to have medicinal properties. In truth, fashionable chemical analyses have proven that sure bezoars, when immersed in an answer that features arsenic, can certainly extract the poison from the liquid.
Many mad stones, it seems, weren’t fashioned this fashion in any respect. One, owned by a J. M. Dickson of Kansas Metropolis, was discovered to be fossilized coral; one other, introduced to the physician W. J. Hoffman in North Carolina turned out to be simply an interesting-looking pebble. In 1976 Yale College of Medication college Thomas R. Forbes gathered up a lot of studies of mad stones and located them to be, variously, aluminous shale, white feldspar, halloysite, and different minerals. One, provided to the Smithsonian as a real mad stone for the low value of $1,000, turned out to be the polished seed of a Kentucky espresso tree. Whereas some certainly might have been bezoars of assorted varieties, what appeared to matter way more is just not what they had been made from, however moderately they appeared like: A mad stone candidate needed to look totally different, unusual, not fairly like stone—both by means of texture or colour—that made it appear someway natural in origin, one thing as soon as residing that had ossified. Its magic got here from this singularity and perception.
Lincoln’s son Robert lived to be 82 years outdated—a mad stone success story. Most believed {that a} purposeful mad stone was infallible—they all the time labored, if operated correctly. The few instances a mad stone failed, it was due to a shortcoming of the affected person. One man, bitten on the chin, died of rabies as a result of his beard was too thick to correctly accommodate a mad stone. One other particular person, bitten on the lips, by accident swallowed a few of the poison from the chunk earlier than the mad stone might take impact. Along with Sutton’s prolific stone, the Milam Mad Stone of Collin County, Texas, supposedly saved greater than 400 lives in its 47-year profession, failing solely twice. The Lightburne Stone was in use for over a century, with its homeowners stating it was referred to as into motion at the very least as soon as per week, and extra within the Canine Days of August. The papers had been stuffed with studies of profitable mad stone therapies. “A Son of William Stittles, of Mecklenburg County, severely bitten on the leg by a mad canine, went to Charlotte to be handled by Mr. Butler,” famous The New York Occasions on June 19, 1885: “the stone adhered for 2 hours, and on a second utility adhered for half-hour. The check was witnessed by a physician and several other residents.”
After all, all of this appears doubtful now. Any type of poison- or pathogen-sucking capillary perform is unattainable to duplicate a scientific setting. Rabies viruses don’t seem as inexperienced scum. Milk will be naturally sticky with out some type of mystical suction. On condition that rabies is inevitably deadly, it appears unlikely that the stones had been so profitable at curing individuals who had truly contracted the illness. Many could have simply been bitten by animals with out rabies. It seems that tales about effectiveness could have simply been inflated with time, constructed on a affirmation bias from the few instances individuals didn’t get sick and die. There are many documented examples of mad stone failure: a household in Fort Value in 1886, as reported in Science, a railroad employee in Missouri described within the Missouri Republican, a person in New Albany, Mississippi, who was bitten by a rabid canine in February 1886, used a mad stone in close by Waterford, solely to succumb to the illness two months later.
However the attraction of the mad stone is straightforward given the options—painful cauterization or sure loss of life—as a measure of energy and management over an unstoppable foe. The reason of the stone’s mechanism as drawing out the poison means that at the very least on some stage believers thought it may be scientific moderately than folks magic. Maybe it’s higher to explain the idea in a mad stone’s powers not as anti-science a lot as dangerous science.
Maybe the clearest proof that they didn’t ever work is the decision of medical historical past: They roughly disappeared as soon as Pasteur’s vaccine grew to become extensively accessible. However for a time, they compelled, significantly for his or her unusual origin as amalgam of animal, vegetable, and mineral. In her 1966 ebook Purity and Hazard, anthropologist Mary Douglas describes how people create tradition by classifying the world with taxonomies. Utilizing the E book of Leviticus for instance, she means that these issues that match our scheme of categorization will be thought-about “clear.” Violation of that human-imposed order, nonetheless, may be “unclean.” It’s the relationship of the sacred and the profane. “In that sense the universe is split between issues and actions that are topic to restriction and others which aren’t; among the many restrictions some are supposed to guard divinity from profanation, and others to guard the profane from the damaging intrusion of divinity,” Douglas wrote.
On this gentle, the mad stone crosses boundaries by blurring our neat categorizations of life and non-life, the sentient and the inert, and that’s the supply of its therapeutic energy: Transgression.
This, maybe, additionally explains why its major objective is to treatment rabies, of all illnesses—the one which reminds us, terrifyingly, that wildness is round us and in us, and welcomed into our dwelling. A illness that transgresses the boundaries between nature and society requires an antidote that additionally straddles worlds.
Colin Dickey is the writer of 5 books of nonfiction, together with Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and, most not too long ago, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy. He additionally hosts Atlas Obscura’s Monster of the Month.