ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the relationship among bezoar stones, animals, and medical knowledge from 1500 to 1800. European physicians had believed in the power of the bezoar stone for so many generations that few needed empirical proof of its effects: it was the ultimate anti-poison and the perfect gift for one who had everything. In the ancient and medieval periods, bezoar stones extracted from sheep and goats in the Indian Ocean world had a reputation for excellence. However, when Iberian trade opened new global sea routes, a supply of these natural things came directly to Europe from India, Brazil, Peru, and New Spain. Europeans brought their own vision of bezoars’ medical power to the Americas where they believed that they were encountering pre-existing indigenous traditions that, like the Mediterranean one, prized such stones for causing fertility in animals and curing maladies. By the late sixteenth century, merchants had flooded the bezoar market with stones pulled from the digestive tracts of New World animals, including llamas, vicuñas, guanacos, manatees, and even iguanas. Confronted with the merger of seemingly diverse bezoar traditions, naturalists, medical theorists, and practitioners wrestled with the boundaries of bezoar-producing animals and raised concerns about fraudulent substances. Intense demand led to bezoar bioprospecting and the slaughter of many bezoar-carrying animals in search of stones. Along its trajectory from essential animal cure and global super drug to taxonomic animal classification and finally incurable malady, the bezoar became a changeling object, a natural thing whose many transformations led to ontological instability.
