[HN Gopher] The Mad Stone, the One-Time 'Cure' for Rabies
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The Mad Stone, the One-Time 'Cure' for Rabies
Author : drdee
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-03-11 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| lupusreal wrote:
| Youtube recently gave me this neat video about an obscure
| historical aspect of rabies, the dreaded "phoby cat", a species
| of animal one time believed to be born rabid and 'patient zero'
| for all other rabies infections:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-xcVS1mt48
|
| I first found this channel from Tom Scott's newsletter. He's
| pretty good at storytelling, so I'll not spoil more of it.
| rob74 wrote:
| MY first thought was a pretty morbid one: hit them over the head
| with a big enough stone hard enough, and they won't be infecting
| anyone with rabies anymore. A radical "cure", but would have
| (since rabies in humans is almost certainly deadly once symptoms
| appear) ultimately worked better than what the article
| describes...
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > hit them over the head with a big enough stone hard enough,
| and they won't be infecting anyone with rabies
|
| According to Wikipedia there are no documented cases of human
| to human transmission by biting, and the only recorded cases of
| transmission from one human to another were inadvertent via
| organ transplant.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies#Transmission
| lupusreal wrote:
| Even so, if the vaccine weren't available I would want to get
| bonked with the rock. That's a more merciful way to go.
| elektrontamer wrote:
| No need for a rock. Hanging will work just fine.
| chasil wrote:
| The article also said that patients were smothered when
| aversion to water emerged as a symptom. They were probably
| thinking right along with you.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > As one source explained, the mad stone was "...so constructed
| with its innumerable cells that when applied to the lacerated
| flesh, it adheres at once and every cell exercises a suction
| power, but does not absorb any substance except Virus; because
| the cells are too diminutive in size to take in even blood, which
| is too coarse and tough to gain entrance."
|
| reminds me of having to take activated charcoal for stomach
| troubles
|
| iirc the mechanism was that, since the surface area of the porous
| charcoal was greater than your stomach lining by an order of
| magnitude (and since entropy pushes concentration towards the
| mean), it was basically like eating a sponge and having it soak
| up everything, including a large volume of whatever is irritating
| your stomach, so your body's defenses can focus on whatever is
| left
| im3w1l wrote:
| So the stone was supposed to be boiled in milk right? And then
| applied to the wound? Since they mention cauterization as an
| alternative treatment, could the benefit come simply from
| applying a boiling-temperature stone to the wound?
| webwielder2 wrote:
| There was no benefit.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Cauterization would have to be applied immediately to have any
| chance of working.
|
| However, another mechanism comes to mind that would permit the
| existence of madstones: Note that they were often organic in
| nature and note the milk bit. I'm thinking of some very heat
| tolerant bacteria living in the material, boiling it in milk
| will give it a nutrient-rich liquid basically devoid of other
| pathogens. Suppose said bacteria exhibits a surface antigen
| matching some part of the rabies virus?
|
| You can make a vaccine by exhibiting the target structure on a
| harmless pathogen. (Case in point, Sputnik V. It's not usually
| done because such a vaccine also makes the patient immune to
| the vaccine--Sputnik V primary dose and booster dose were
| separate things because of this.) And how does a bacteria come
| to exhibit this? There's plenty of viral code embedded in our
| DNA, the same thing could happen to a bacteria.
|
| While this is obviously a low-probability scenario I don't see
| that it can be ruled out. There are an awful lot of pathogens
| out there that don't cause obvious symptoms and thus have never
| been studied. (Sometimes they cause non-obvious symptoms,
| though--think of HPV and cancer for the well-known case but
| there are others. Personally, I suspect that we have only
| scratched the surface on this.)
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| This is a bit like cutting off your nose after being infected
| with Covid. It doesn't help, its already in your bloodstream.
| If any of that, helped even a little, we'd be doing it
| modernity too.
|
| The more popular 19th century technique was to cut out all the
| flesh from that area, which didn't work either. Amputations
| were done too, but those didn't work. Our modern understanding
| is that the success stories were because the person never
| contacted rabies in the first place.
|
| Rabies is a great argument against pet ownership, which would
| have vastly cut down on urban rabies as they came almost
| exclusively from feral dogs.
|
| Also this article sort of plays down how desperate and non-
| sensical rabies treatments have been through history. It opens
| up this pandering narrative of "what if this stone worked
| somehow?" But its just as false as any other treatment. Sadly,
| these treatments were signs of desperation. It must have been
| horrific to be bitten before modern medicine. Even sadder, the
| patients who didnt respond to miracle cures were murdered by
| the staff trying to cure them, which seemed to be the only
| "real" treatment. Adults and children were murdered in cold
| blood by these "healers." Regardless of the ethics of rabies
| treatments and euthanasia, this is still murder due to the
| legalities and the arbitrary decision when to kill the patient.
| These people were killed often without explicit notification
| and approval of law, family, etc. It was just something that
| was allowed and when family dropped off their sick there, it
| was assumed they'd never see them again. The killings were
| brutal. Adults and children shoved between two mattresses as
| staff held them down so they asphyxiated. Or stabbed and left
| to bleed out.
|
| There poor souls were essentially dropped off to "healers" who
| tortured them and murdered them when the tortures didn't work.
|
| I imagine the stone was popular because your other alternatives
| were extremely gruesome.
|
| This paper goes into the historic treatments and is interesting
| to read:
|
| Prevention and treatment otherwise made no significant
| progress. Medical or surgical management delineated in Ancient
| Greece or Rome became increasingly tinted with religion. In
| Europe a miracle cure was deemed to be found at several
| specialized religious sites [51], such as the church of the
| village of Andage, renamed Saint-Hubert, where Louis I the
| Pious, one of Charlemagne's sons and his successor, authorized
| the transfer of the eponymous saint's thighbones in 826 CE.
| This abbey located near Liege, Belgium became a specialized
| center for rabies prevention. At the time, prevention before a
| bite took the form of applying a white-hot Key of Saint Hubert
| to dogs so they would not contract the disease [52,53]. An
| example of this amulet can be seen at
| http://www.webcitation.org/6os1x82Ty. Contrary to what was
| practiced in other reputed sites such as San Bellino [17], near
| present-day Rovigo in Italy, or in Saint-Tugen's chapel in
| Primelin, France, this method must have been considered too
| cruel or too unreliable in humans bitten by suspected rabid
| animals. In humans, the preferred method of rabies prevention
| after a bite was based on incision of the forehead and
| implantation of threads from the Saint's supposedly miraculous
| stole, accompanied by prayers and fasting [19,25,52,53,54]. In
| spite of Ambroise Pare--who after the siege of Turin in 1536
| discontinued the practice of cauterization to heal wounds
| [55,56]--Dioscorides' and Celsus' cauterization approach
| remained widespread in the management of rabies risks well into
| the 19thC [31,57]. This may be because cauterization was
| performed to inactivate a "poison" and perhaps also because
| their work was never lost to practitioners in Europe in spite
| of the fall of the Roman Empire [58,59]. Patients, however,
| found little recourse should prevention fail: at Saint-Tugen
| chapel, patients with declared rabies were stifled between
| mattresses until the beginning of the 19thC.
|
| The understanding of post-bite rabies prevention in animals or
| in humans, however, still made no progress. Published on 17
| June 1684, the first edition of Medicina Curiosa, the first
| English-language journal wholly dedicated to medicine,
| describes post-exposure prevention failure in a suspected human
| case of rabies acquired from a cat [89]. "Treatment" after a
| bite remained faith-based [90] or otherwise fanciful, based for
| example on applying hair of the biting dog ("hair of the dog")
| to the wound [28,66] or omelets flavored with "dog-rose root"
| (Rosa canina or cynorrhodon, as already suggested by Pliny the
| Elder in the 1stC CE) [91,92,93,94,95]. The same was true
| outside Europe [96]. Suggested therapies--some even based on
| homeopathic approaches--were rightly criticized as ineffective
| [97]. The fact that rabies is not transmitted in all cases even
| after the bite of an evidently rabid dog or wolf contributed to
| the illusion that each of the many preventive "treatments" had
| been effective.
|
| These are all too easily disparaged as ludicrous
| recommendations made by self-assured and pompous clinicians,
| steeped from old-wives' remedies. They are, however, sure signs
| of desperate and all-out efforts by health providers of the
| time to save their patients from what to this day remains an
| intractable disease. Vigorous approaches continued to be used
| well into the mid-19thC: In 1830s London, children bitten by
| potentially rabid dogs still underwent surgery or cauterization
| of the wound [57] (still discussed by Babes in 1912 [72]).
| Patients with clinically declared rabies were plunged into cold
| water or hot oil as recommended by Celsus [31,86], or were
| later euthanized by being stifled between mattresses or made to
| bleed to death [17,90,98,99].
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082082/
| chasil wrote:
| Kurzgesagt put out a video on the lifecycle of the lyssa virus
| recently.
|
| How a milk-covered stone interacts with this process is
| completely beyond me.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u5I8GYB79Y
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