This would explain why it was often deemed necessary to place a bezoar stone into a drinking cup to ensure it would provide protection. It’s also been suggested, perhaps a tad more reasonably, that the phosphate minerals covering the outside of a bezoar stone-along with sulfur-containing breakdown products of any hair incorporated into the stone-are able to sop up arsenic from a drink poisoned with this toxic metalloid. Cases of poisoning and other noxious diseases were said to have been cured by them, and one was used as a last resort at the death of King Charles II.” “These fell out,” Gardiner went on, “and men gathered them up. “The deer ate snakes, which caused such intense stomach-ache that tears were brought to the animal’s eyes” (although deer are generally herbivores, they are known to gulp down small animals opportunistically). Gardiner, a World War Two-era surgeon, in the British Medical Journal. How did bezoars come to be viewed as magical cure-alls? “The legend of the bezoar stones, which was generally credited in olden times, was that they were the crystallized tears of deer,” wrote Ralph H.
Not only did Queen Elizabeth I count a bezoar set in a silver ring among her crown jewels, the very word was used to refer to the pale beige color of several of her clothes. Over time, these bits of rock are coated with concentric layers of calcium and magnesium phosphate minerals derived from the contents of an animal’s gut-akin to how a pearl is formed-and worn smooth by peristalsis, the ordered contractions and relaxations of digestive tract muscles. By the 16th century, these intestine-derived remedies were all the rage among wealthy Europeans, owing to their scarcity and exotic nature-they were rarely found in the guts of animals, like deer, antelope, goats, oxen, porcupines, and llamas.īezoar stones, as they were called, form inside animals around small rock fragments lodged in the digestive tract. Employed by Greek and Persian doctors during the 1st millennium CE, the use of bezoars-as charms, or as medicinal powder after grinding-spread to Europe after the 12th century via the Crusaders. Somewhere along the line, folks got it into their heads that bezoars were a powerful antidote against any poison. A bezoar is one such clump, consisting of ingested-but not sufficiently digested-material, of widely varying composition, that forms and persists somewhere it shouldn’t, usually the stomach or small intestine. In some of these pipes, clumps of gunk can form and create blockages. When you get right down to it, a body like ours is basically a bony scaffold that a strange collection of organs, interconnected by a complex entanglement of piping, hangs on. Digestive Tract Bling: A bezoar mounted in gold filigree, from late-17th century India-now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
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