bezoar

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).

borborygmus

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.

Now unless you’re a medical professional, or a big old know-it-all, then chances are you haven’t come across this word before. But I can almost certainly guarantee that it’s happened to you before. Because borborygmus is the technical term for when your stomach rumbles.

Etymologically speaking, the term ‘borborygmus’ has been around a long time – since 1724 to be very specific. It comes from the Greek word borboryzein which means, unsurprisingly, ‘to rumble’. The nice thing about it is that people think that it’s probably onomatopoeic. Go on, say it out loud. Sounds a bit like a stomach gurgle, right?

Borborygmus isn’t entirely confined to medical circles. It sometimes turns up as an adjective – borborygmic – generally used to describe noisy plumbing. Vladimir Nabokov (yes, he of pervy ‘Lolita’ fame) used it in his lesser-known (to me at least) novel ‘Ada’ (which, it turns out, is also pervy, this time in an incest-y way):

“All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.”

Borborygmus facts: The sound your stomach makes when it rumbles actually comes from your small intestine – the noise is produced by muscle contractions (or peristalsis), as food moves through it.

nocebo

Sounds like ‘placebo’, right? Exactly – the nocebo effect is basically placebo’s evil twin. It’s when a patient’s bad expectations about a treatment mean that the treatment has a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. Which is a very long sentence. To give you an example, if someone is given a list of nasty side effects which they then get after taking a placebo, then they’re suffering from the nocebo effect.

The word ‘placebo’ means ‘I shall please’, from the Latin ‘placeō’ (‘I please’). So ‘nocebo’ means ‘I shall harm’ from, you’ve guessed it, noceō: ‘I harm’. It was coined in 1961 by a doctor called Walter Kennedy who I can’t find anything else to say about at all, sorry.

The word ‘placebo’ has been around for much longer than its dark counterpart – there’s a theory that it comes from a medieval practice where mourners were paid to chant for the dead during evening prayers. Because this was seen as a bit of sucky-uppy to him upstairs, these hired mourners were called ‘placebos’.