You know when you come across a word you didn’t know, and then you keep seeing it everywhere? This is what happened to me with ‘bezoar’ this week (well, in two places – QI, and an episode of Audible’s excellent dramatisation of Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman’). A bezoar is a solid mass of indigestible material that forms in the digestive tract. So far, so gross. But, for years many people have believed bezoars to have medicinal properties, and even that they’re full-on magical.
A ring made out of a bezoar. Why, WHY?
The word itself comes from the Persian language – specifically pād-zahr, which means ‘antidote’. In fact, if you were born in 11th-century Europe and were unfortunate enough to get poisoned, it’s likely you’d be presented with a bezoar in a glass of water by your friendly neighbourhood medicine person. That’s because they were believed to be universal antidotes that would cure any type of poison. This was proved to be utter bullshit in 1567 by a French surgeon called Ambroise Paré. He found a cook in the King’s court who’d been sentenced to death and chosen to be poisoned. He gave the unlucky chef a bezoar stone. As you can probably guess, the man died in agony seven hours after taking the poison. Merde.
It’s actually not all complete bunkum though – modern experiments have shown that bezoars can actually remove arsenic (I guess our French cook was poisoned with something other than arsenic – quel dommage).
There are lots of different types of bezoar. One of the most minging is a trichobezoar. That’s a bezoar made of undigested hair, often formed as a result of Rapunzel syndrome, a (thankfully) rare intestinal condition which comes about from eating too much of YOUR OWN HAIR. One of the largest trichobezoars I could find online was removed from the stomach of an 18-year-old woman in India and was a metre long, weighing in at 1.13kg (2.5lbs). If you’d like to feel a bit sick, you can check out the actual thing in this article. Wikipedia also lists a 4.5kg (9.9lbs) hairball which came out of a woman (ladies, what are you doing?!) in Chicago in 2006, but thankfully I couldn’t find a picture of that one (actually I didn’t look, as I didn’t think my stomach could handle it).