by Lydia Kang
Terra sigillata, plus Latin.
Eat Your Clay
Though unlikely to be recommended by your doctor, eating clay for medicinal purposes is still very much alive in alternative therapies. Proponents claim that ingesting clay can help your body detoxify by adsorbing, and then passing through, heavy metals that have accumulated in your insides.
The problem, however, is that we actually need some metals in our system—iron, for example—and clay is not very good at discriminating among metal types. It’s also not always easy to know exactly what else is in the clay you’re eating. It could carry parasites, bacteria, or even, ironically, heavy metals such as lead. As a result, the practice is not typically recommended by physicians today.
But that didn’t stop actress Shailene Woodley from proclaiming her own experiments with clay eating in an interview on the Late Show with David Letterman and in a blog post for the beauty website Into the Gloss in 2014:
So, I’ve discovered that clay is great for you because your body doesn’t absorb it, and it apparently provides a negative charge, so it bonds to negative isotopes. And, this is crazy: It also helps clean heavy metals out of your body. My friend started eating it and the next day she called me and said, “Dude, my shit smells like metal.” She was really worried, but we did some research together and everything said that when you first start eating clay, your bowel movements, pee, and even you, yourself, will smell like metal.
If you want to experiment with making your shit smell like metal, beware: Eating small amounts of processed clay is considered mostly harmless, but binge on the stuff and you’ll end up with constipation … or worse. The best way to get calcium and other minerals is not from a pit you dig outside your house.
Poison is everywhere. Naturally or unnaturally, it can be in the soil (arsenic), in the air (carbon monoxide), in your drinks (lead), and in your food (cyanide). With so much danger around, it’s no wonder humans have obsessed over finding a universal antidote—the one thing that could save us from all toxins. Imagine you’re a medieval prince about to inherit the throne. Chances are, there are a lot of power-hungry wannabes waiting in the wings. A little arsenic or hemlock might be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Just in case, best have an antidote on standby.
For millennia, a certain amount of magical thinking was employed when arming oneself against poison because science was inconveniently slow to catch up. So grab your handy unicorn horn and a bezoar, and let’s take a look.
The Antidotes Hall of Shame
Bezoars
Bezoars have been used for centuries as antidotes to poisons. A bezoar is solid mass of undigested food, plant fibers, or hair found in the digestive tracts of animals, including deer, porcupines, fish, and, yes, humans. Anyone with a cat is familiar with the less-cool feline version: hairballs.
Bezoars and other stone-like items created by animals often had a good story behind them. Legends told of deer that would eat poisonous snakes and become immune or cry tears that solidified into poison-curing stones. First-century Arabic author al-Birumi claimed bezoars could protect against one poison called “the snot of Satan,” which we hope never ever to encounter. By the twelfth century, when Europe became plagued with, uh, plagues, the bezoar crept into pharmacopeias as panaceas and alexipharmics (poison antidotes).
Bezoars were a seductive notion for the rich and royal, who were at risk of assassination. The stones were often enclosed in bejeweled gold for display or worn as amulets. Indian bezoars, in particular, were sought for life-threatening fevers, poisonous bites, bleeding, jaundice, and melancholy. Consumers were also known to scrape off a bit of bezoar and add it to their drinks for heart health and kidney stones. These tonics were sometimes adulterated with toxic mercury or antimony, which caused vomiting and diarrhea, making buyers think they were effective.
But were they? One team of researchers soaked bezoars in an arsenic-laced solution and found that the stones absorbed the arsenic or that the poison was neutralized. Hard to say if it worked well enough to cure a fatal dose. Ambroise Paré, one of the preeminent French physicians of the sixteenth century, was also a doubter. The king’s cook, who’d been stealing silver, was given the choice between hanging or being Paré’s lab rat. He chose the latter. After the cook consumed poison, Paré looked on as a bezoar was stuffed down his throat. Six hours later, he died wracked with pain. Perhaps he chose … poorly?
Indian bezoar mounted in gold, seventeenth century. Hairballs never looked so fancy.
Mithridates
This antidote was named after Mithridates VI, the king of Pontus and Armenia Minor. Born in 134 bce, he pretty much invented the phrase “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” by consuming poisons daily to prevent his own assassination. His royal home was stocked with stingray spines, toxic mushrooms, scorpions, mineral poisons, and a poisonous plant–filled garden. He was so unpoisonable that after his son took over his kingdom and he faced execution, he couldn’t even commit suicide by poison! He begged a guard to stab him to death. (It worked.)
Though the king’s actual recipe for the antidote is nowhere to be found, versions began to circulate after his death, and they became synonymous with the king himself. Compounds with lengthy and expensive ingredient lists prevailed, including iris, cardamom, anise, frankincense, myrrh, ginger, and saffron. In the first century, Pliny the Elder snarkily remarked, “The Mithridatic antidote is composed of fifty-four ingredients… . Which of the gods, in the name of Truth, fixed these absurd proportions? … It is plainly a showy parade of the art, and a colossal boast of science.”
Showy or not, people would take the extensive mix of herbs, pound them together with honey, and eat a nut-sized portion to cure themselves. At least it endowed them with expensive-smelling breath.
Horns
Unicorn horns have been considered a part of antidote legend since the mythical beast galloped into literature around 300 bce. For centuries afterward, real earthly beasts would sacrifice their lives and their horns to slake our thirst for the miraculous, nonexistent animal, including rhinoceroses, narwhals, and oryx. Even fossilized ammonites were used. It was believed that drinking vessels made of such horns might neutralize poisons, and wounds could be cured by holding them close by. In the sixteenth century, Mary, Queen of Scots reportedly used a unicorn horn to protect her from poisoning. Too bad it didn’t prevent her beheading.
Pearls
Pearls have long been thought to be powerful antidotes. A beautiful, rare gem created by the homely oyster, a pearl is born out of annoyance (the mollusk secretes iridescent nacre to cover an irritant, like a parasite or grain of sand). Pretty as they are, they’re about as useful as the chalky antacid tablets on your bedside table; both are chiefly made of calcium carbonate. Good for a stomachache after some spicy food, but not exactly miraculous.
Pearl powder has been used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat a variety of diseases, and Ayurvedic physicians used it as an antidote in the Middle Ages. It was also reported to make people immortal. An old Taoist recipe recommended taking a long pearl and soaking it in malt, “serpent’s gall,” honeycomb, and pumice stone. When softened, it would be pulled like taffy and cut into bite-sized pieces to eat, and voilà! You would suddenly no longer need food to stay alive. Cleopatra famously drank down a large and costly pearl dissolved in wine vinegar, though in that case she wasn’t avoiding poison. She didn’t want to lose a bet with Antony—which might have fatally injured her pride.
Theriac
Theriac was an herbal concoction created in the first century by Emperor Nero’s physician, Andromachus, who was reported to have Mithridates’s secret notes. It was a mashed formula of about seventy ingredients, including cinnamon, opium, rose, iris, lavender, and acacia in a honey base. In the twelfth century, theriac made in Venice was branded as particularly special, and Venetian treacle (derived from a Middle English translation of theriac) became a hot commodity. Its public, dramatic production often attracted curious crowds.
By the eighteenth century, cheaper golden syrup was substituted for honey. As treacle began to lose its luster as a treatment, its definition as an herbal remedy disappeared from common vernacular. But the sweet syrup remained. Which is why when we think of treacle, we think of treacle tarts, not a fancy means of saving ourselves from a deathly poisoning.
Tasty antidote, anyone?
What Actually Works
Thankfully, science has brought us a wide range of antidotes for many items we shouldn’t be exposed to in dangerous quantities, if at all. N-acetylcysteine, fondly referred to as NAC by doctors, saves us from acetaminophen overdoses. Ethanol can treat antifreeze poisoning. Atropine, ironically one of the main components of plants in the toxic nightshade family (such as mandrake), can treat poisoning from some dangerous fertilizers and chemical nerve agents used as weapons. For years, poisonings were treated with emetics, though it turns out that plain old carbon—in the form of activated charcoal—can adsorb poisons (the poisons stick to the surface of the charcoal) in the digestive system before they’re dissolved and digested by the body.
As long as the natural world and its humans keep making things to kill us off, we’ll keep developing methods to not die untimely deaths.
We’ll just leave the fancy hairballs off the list.
Tools
Slicing, Dicing, Dousing, and Draining
12
Bloodletting
Of Mozart’s Requiem, Nonfunny Humors,the Origin of the Barber Pole, Real Iron Men, and George Washington’s No Good, Very Bad Cold
In August 1791, at the age of thirty-five, an ailing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart received a commission to compose a requiem mass for an anonymous patron. Mozart, who had been suffering from weight loss, anemia, headaches, and swoons, became paranoid that he was being commissioned to write his own requiem.
Weeks later, his already moody personality wasn’t the only thing that worsened. By November, he was unable to leave his bed. Attacks of violent vomiting, diarrhea, and arthritis, plus swelling of his hands and feet, made it impossible to continue composing. The songs of his beloved pet canary became insufferable. He was convinced he was being poisoned.
His physicians tried to save him, but one of the popular treatments at the time may have been the very cause of his demise: bloodletting. Some have estimated that he may have lost more than four pints of blood in his last week of life. His sister-in-law, Sophie Haibel, noted, “They bled him and applied cold compresses to his head, whereupon his forces visibly forsook him and he lost consciousness, which he never recovered.” Mozart died twenty-four hours later and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Without an autopsy, no one will ever know the true cause of his death, but many believe with certainty that bloodletting helped end an extraordinary life.
A posthumous portrait of Mozart.
Bad Blood
Blood leaking out of the lanced arms of sick patients. The smell of iron in the air. The sticky drip of liquid into a ceramic collecting bowl, notched on the sides to fit a limp arm. Today, the act of cutting into a blood vessel to spill blood—on purpose, voluntarily—is worth a modern head-shake of incredulity. Since antiquity, blood has been considered the essential component of life. Even the Bible states that “the life of flesh is in the blood,” which makes the practice of bloodletting so fascinating. After all, why on earth remove what you need to live?
First, you have to put yourself in the mindset of ancient physicians. The earliest evidence of bloodletting—among Egyptians around 1500 bce—is from a time when the inner workings of the body were a mystery. They were drawing conclusions from limited information. Ancient Romans had thought that a woman’s menses was a natural way to remove toxins from the body, so removing blood from people seemed a reasonable way to keep one healthy. And because this was long before we discovered that blood circulates throughout the body, texts from the Han Dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) discuss how blood could become “stagnant” and how removing old, “decayed” blood was one way to fix this stasis.
Or maybe the sick were just imbalanced and in need of a good purge. So went the theories of Hippocrates and his four humors. Too much blood, phlegm, yellow bile, or black bile? Purge via bleeding, vomiting, or clearing the bowels.
Also a fan of the whole “too much blood” theory, Erasistratus—who didn’t even advocate bloodletting—inadvertently gave the practice a boost in the third century bce by proposing that many illnesses stemmed from plethora, or being overloaded with blood. Although he recommended vomiting, diet, or exercise to fix plethora, many physicians turned to bloodletting.
It was only a matter of time before we entered cure-all territory. In the second century ce, Galen declared that bleeding was the solution for everything wrong with the body—including hemorrhage. Let that one stew for a while.
Anatomy and physiology had a ways to go, obviously.
Often, bloodletting was done in a reasonable fashion—excluding young children and the very old or trying to avoid removing excessive amounts—but that wasn’t always the case. There were plenty of gory missteps on our way to modern phlebotomy. Sure, the why behind bloodletting was disturbing, but the how was pretty skin-crawling, too.
So, who was doing all this bleeding anyway?
Tools of a Blood-Soaked Trade
Anything that could cut was used for bloodletting. Animal teeth, stones, sharpened pieces of wood, quills, shells. As the process evolved, so did the tools. By the seventeenth century, practitioners had the procedure down to a science: First, a tourniquet would be applied, then the upper arm’s basilic vein would be slit open. And what was used to slice into that vein? Let’s see… .
The lancet was one of the more sophisticated tools of the last few centuries. It was a curved or pointed blade on the end of a handle. To this day, one of the most popular international medical journals is named after this beloved instrument: The Lancet. Thumb lancets were pocket-sized versions that folded into a pretty ivory or tortoiseshell case for the fashionable bleeder on the go.
A spring-loaded lancet.
The fleam was a multi-bladed, multi-sized contraption used for larger cuts and often for bleeding larger subjects like horses.
A thirteenth-century iron fleam.
With a name that could be mistaken for a 1980s horror movie, the scarificator was a box with multiple spring-loaded blades, often used prior to cupping (inducing a vacuum under a glass cup) in order to draw more blood.
The exterior of a scarificator.
Every tool had its loyal fans. J. E. Snodgrass proclaimed in 1841 his adoration for his spring-loaded lancet:
I love thee, bloodstain’d, faithful friend! …And I shall love thee to the Last!
Perhaps there was no one at the time to tell him Get thee a room.
Shave and a Haircut and a Bleeding
In ancient Rome, multitalented stylists known as tonsures were responsible for polishing up their clients by cutting hair, trimming nails and calluses, yanking bad teeth, and bloodletting. For a price, you came away with a mani-pedi, a gap-toothed grin, and a case of anemia.
In medieval Europe, the barber-surgeon became the go-to person for not only cosmetic services, but amputations, cupping, leeching, and boil draining. Smallpox a problem? Bleed it away. Epilepsy? Bleed that, too. Plague? Step on in, ignore the bloody rags on the floor, and please don’t die in my chair.
Initially, the shedding of blood was often done by the clergy for themselves and others. Monks and clerics were celibate, and bloodletting seemed to tame their libidos further (the anti-Viagra of the day!). But after 1163, Pope Alexander III forbade the clergy from involving themselves in studies of a physical nature. The canon declared that “the church abhors blood” and thereafter clerics did not perform surgery or bloodletting, nor did they study anatomy. In England, barber-surgeons took up the role. The bloodletter would smell, touch, and taste the blood (let’s heave a collective ewww here) to diagnose the patient. Bowls of blood would sit on barbers�
�� windowsills to attract customers before a law was passed that required them to quietly pitch the blood into the River Thames instead.
The modern barber pole, already becoming an antique in our day with its twirling red, blue, and white (or just red and white), is a throwback to these barber-surgeons, who placed the poles outside their place of work to advertise their vocation. The pole symbolized the stick that a patient would squeeze to facilitate the bleeding process, with a bowl at the bottom to catch the spilled liquid. Some say the white stripe symbolized the tourniquet, the blue represented the vein, and the red, blood.
Next time you go to your barber, maybe ask for a good bleeding and see if he gets the historical joke.
The classic barber pole, a vestige of the profession’s role in bloodletting.
Bleed Yourself to Bliss
It’s the seventeenth century and you’ve been dumped by the gent you thought was surely The One. Oh, what could fix this broken heart? Some brandy and gossip with a good friend? A pint of the Baroque-era equivalent of Ben & Jerry’s? Close! A broken heart does call for a pint of something; it’s just not as pleasant as Chunky Monkey.
In 1623, French physician Jacques Ferrand wrote an entire book on surgical cures for lovesickness, particularly if the sufferer was “plump and well fed.” He recommended bloodletting to the point of heart failure (literal heart failure, that is) and noted that “the opening of the hemorrhoids is the surest remedy.” Because somehow he had figured out that heartbreak and hemorrhoids go hand in hand.
This wasn’t the first time bloodletting entered the realm of mental health. Like anatomy, psychology had also long been a mystery to doctors. Confusing and seemingly incurable ailments like heartbreak, melancholy, and mania had many a physician reaching for his lancet. The Huang Di Nei Jing texts from the Han Dynasty prescribed bloodletting for symptoms of “incessant laughing” or mania, because a little hemorrhage was sure to quiet you down. Later, Galen had thought that different types of “insanity”—frenzy, mania, melancholy, and fatuity (foolishness)—were due to humoral imbalances and, thus, they required bleeding.