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There
was a time on the frontier and in the days of extreme rural isolation
when you would do anything you had to do to lay hands on a madstone.
That time usually came right after a rabid animal bit you because
a good madstone was believed to be the only cure for the fatal misfortune
of rabies.
Madstones were (and are, for that matter) basically gut rocks stones
consisting mostly of magnesium, calcium, chromium, nickel, copper,
and lead. They form in the innards of ruminant animals such as cows,
horses, buffalo, and deer that ingest dirt, hair balls, rocks, or
foreign matter like metal while grazing on grass. Much as a grain
of sand embedded in an oyster turns into a pearl, the gut rocks calcify
into madstones.
The current market for madstones is way down, nonexistent actually,
but a madstone was highly valued at a time when bites from animals
that carry rabies—skunks, raccoons, dogs and coyotes—were
more common because the animals were more common and people spent
more time outdoors.
The premium madstones were said to come from the belly of a deer.
If the host animal was a white deer, you were dealing with pure magic.
Or so the belief went. And the madstones were effective. Most people
treated with madstones did not come down with rabies, but that might
be because most of the bites came from non-rabid animals.
Still, at a time when rabid animals outnumbered doctors, people didn't
take any chances. If they were bitten by a member of any animal species
known to carry rabies, the first order of business was to secure a
madstone or have one or two in reserve.
The stones were usually boiled in water or milk and applied to the
wound. The best madstones were porous and would stick to the wound,
sometimes for several hours.. When the madstone fell off, the poison
was believed to be gone, though some people applied the stone a second
time as a booster.
Most of the madstones on the frontier came from buffalo and were usually
secured during the field-dressing process. Particularly good madstones
were passed down from one generation to the next. Neighbors also called
on each other to borrow a madstone to cure a black widow spider bite
because madstones were believed to work on any poisonous bite, even
from venomous snakes.
In
Texas, Doctor Benjamin Tomas Crumley was among the best-known doctors
who used madstones. He was half-Cherokee and spent several years studying
medicinal herbs with elders of that tribe and might have attended
medical school in Paris. He was much in demand and highly regarded
all over Central Texas during the last two decades of the 19th century.
Dr. Crumley's medical kit always included a good madstone.
Warren Angus Ferris, a pioneer surveyor who plotted a little settlement
named Warwick that was later renamed Dallas,
detailed use of the madstone in his diaries. Ferris was bitten on
the leg by a rabid raccoon that broke into his home one night and
tangled with two of his dogs, which later had to be destroyed when
they came down with "the slobbering fits."
Ferris went straight to a neighbor on the Trinity River who had a
madstone. Ferris wrote that during the time the stone was attached
to the bite "the evaporating water could be seen as it was boiling
at every tube, and I could feel a distinct burning sensation in the
wound such as I would presume would be induced by a minute blister
of flies."
Ferris believed that the porous nature of the stone produced a vacuum
in its openings that was caused by the hot water evaporating and that
the bacteria had a strong chemical affinity for something in the madstone.
Regardless of whether it worked that way or not, Ferris never came
down with rabies. |
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