Animals and Insects Remedies

1801 - Domestic Event

In addition to plant cures, traditional medicine often uses animal or insect products as remedies. Perhaps the most familiar one today is a dose of chicken soup for the common cold. People often dismiss such ideas as “old wives’ tales,” and many have no basis in fact. But some have been scientifically proven to work.

Certain traditional remedies use animal or insect products because of their chemical properties. Cobwebs, for example, are absorbent and were used for many years by North Carolinians to stop wounds from bleeding. Other remedies were based primarily on belief in an object’s magical qualities, like carrying rabbits’ feet as protective charms against disease.

In some cases, people believed the qualities of one being can be transferred to another. A snakeskin belt or a snakeskin around the wrist was thought to cure rheumatism, since the snake’s flexibility would transfer to the patient’s joints.

There are also records of treatments whose rationale is totally unknown. Even in the early 1900s, some people claimed that smothering a mole in your hand would cure boils, warts and headaches.

“Snake oil” remedies took advantage of people’s beliefs in the magical properties of animal substances.

Rabbit’s feet and snakeskin were thought to prevent or relieve disease.

Madstones

The following item was published in the Charlotte Daily Observer, November 26, 1907:

Spencer, Nov. 24.— Leon Brown, a young son of Frank A. Brown, of Spencer, was bitten yesterday by a mad dog at Mount Pleasant, where the lad was visiting his grandparents. He was brought to Spencer at once and a mad stone owned by Mrs. H. P. Dorsett, of Lexington, was brought here and applied to the wounds. The stone adhered for several hours and apparently relieved the swollen flesh on the limb of the suffering child. The dog was killed and its head sent to a specialist at Raleigh for examination, where it was decided that the dog had rabies. The child is improving and it is believed will recover.

Had you lived in North Carolina 100 years ago, that account might seem perfectly reasonable to you. Even some doctors used madstones to cure the bites of rabid animals or draw out the venom of snake and spider bites.

Madstones are hard, porous masses of calcium phosphate, formed from hair or fiber balls caught in the digestive tracts of cud-chewing animals. Their name comes from the delirious behavior caused by hydrophobia, a condition produced by the rabies virus.

Before Louis Pasteur’s rabies immunization came to North Carolina in 1915, madstones were in great demand, difficult to find and highly prized. Some accounts tell of owners charging up to $100 for lending a madstone or requiring a $1,000 bond to guarantee its return. More than 50 have been reported in the state in the past century.

To treat someone bitten by a rabid animal, you would clean the madstone in warm milk or water and place it on the bite. The stone would cling tightly to the wound, allegedly absorbing the poison, until it fell off. Then you would soak it again in the liquid to draw the poison out, leaving the madstone ready for later use.

Madstones are still used occasionally, although no scientific evidence supports the claims of their effectiveness. Medical research does note that 80 percent of people bitten by rabid animals will not develop hydrophobia, and that poisonous bites are not always fatal. So belief in this cure may have originated from simple coincidence.

Madstones have been used to cure poisonous and rabid animal bites in Europe, Asia and across North Carolina.