Kings prized bezoar stones as poison antidotes until a surgeon tested one
For centuries a hard lump from an animal's gut was worth more than jewels. Bezoars, it was said, could neutralise any poison dropped into a cup that held one. Queen Elizabeth I wore one in a ring, and an English court case over a fake bezoar helped establish the rule 'let the buyer beware'.
A bezoar is a mass that builds up in the digestive tract from material the body cannot break down, such as plant fibre or hair. The word comes from the Persian pad-zahr, meaning antidote, and the belief in its power began in the Islamic world and India. The Andalusian physician Ibn Zuhr, known in Europe as Avenzoar, who died in 1161, is thought to have written the earliest description of bezoars as medicine. In the Mongol Empire they were called jada and used in shamanic rituals to summon storms.
Arabic medical texts brought bezoars to Europe in the 12th century, and booming trade in the 16th and 17th centuries made them fashionable. Stones from East Indies goats and monkeys were rated the most potent, and buyers came to believe they could also treat plague, epilepsy and melancholy. Rudolf II displayed them in his cabinets of curiosities, and for elites they signalled wealth as much as protection.
Doubt grew alongside demand. In 1567 the French surgeon Ambroise Paré arranged a test: a condemned cook in the royal kitchens agreed to take poison on the promise of a bezoar afterwards. The stone did nothing, and he died seven hours later. Counterfeits flooded the market, and in the 1603 case Chandelor v Lopus a buyer who sued over a sham bezoar lost, a landmark for the principle of caveat emptor.
Oddly, the legend was not wholly baseless. Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that bezoars soaked in an arsenic solution do pull out the poison. One form of arsenic swaps places with phosphate in a mineral called brushite inside the stone; another binds to sulfur in the proteins of degraded hair, a key ingredient of many bezoars.
Source: Bezoar
