Snakestones (research for Text Project)

A variant of bezoars / Goa stones - and very controversial they turned out to be.

"As New World flora and fauna came to the attention of European physicians and as Europeans gave increasing attention to indigenous African and Asian medical therapies, seventeenth-century natural philosophers and physicians faced a vast expansion in the number of plant and animal substances purported to be of medicinal value. The snakestones, called piedras della cobra de Capelos, began to trickle into Europe, primarily from India, in the 1650s. The stones themselves, illustrated in Figure 1, were lenticular in shape, of green or reddish color, and about the size of a small Italian coin."

The missionaries and merchants returning to Europe in the early 17th century "also transmitted lore regarding the abilities of such natural products to cure various types of sickness. They reported that natives of India and China used snakestones to cure poisoning inflicted by snakebite. Supposedly, the stone adhered tenaciously when placed on top of a poisonous wound. After sucking up all the poison, it fell spontaneously from the wound, leaving the victim in perfect health. If later soaked in a bowl of milk, the snakestone was drained of its imbibed poison (which

it imparted to the milk, turning it a greenish color) and could be used repeatedly."

"Those who imported the stones, which reputedly were concreted naturally in the heads of indigenous poisonous cobra snakes, claimed that they acted as antidotes to all forms of poisoning in the human body. The high seriousness with which the debaters tested the claims of these merchants and missionaries, their painstaking gathering of experimental evidence, and the passion with which they constructed their arguments for and against the efficacy of this remedy suggest that the stones evoked issues far deeper than the prospect of adding another ingredient to the standard toxicological pharmacopoeia of Western Europe."

"Snakestones were simply one among the numerous exotic medicaments that virtuosi prized."

"the local brahmins of the Quam-si Province of China skillfully captured native hooded cobra

serpents and surgically extracted the stones from their skulls.... the brahmins also manufactured equally efficacious stones from a mixture of the heads, hearts, livers, and teeth of the serpents; although he noted that they guarded this recipe for the manufacture of artificial stones with strictest secrecy, he warned that some spurious stones were in circulation since the genuine merchandise commanded a high price."

Snakestones persisted as a medicine into the 18th century, largely on the basis of verbal reports in correspondence, often at second hand. This was an era when medicine was based on balancing the "humours" of the patient, and new treatments (such as mineral-based quick-acting drugs) were looked on with suspicion.

The Snakestone Experiments: An Early Modern Medical Debate. Martha Baldwin. Isis Vol. 86, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 394-418. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/235020