The farmer killed the dog, and alarmed neighbors, drawn by the commotion, quickly identified the dog as rabid. This meant that the farmer was infected and would soon die, a fact he understood all too well.
Nevertheless, he mounted his horse and rode 25 miles to the town of Buffalo, where Reverend William Newton Sutton lived. Many in the area knew that Sutton possessed a miraculous Mad Stone capable of curing those afflicted with rabies. Sutton received Adam, instructed him to roll up his trouser leg to expose the bitten leg, and sent his youngest son to fetch a pitcher of fresh milk.
Once everything was prepared, Sutton produced the Mad Stone—a small grayish-white pebble, seemingly ordinary in appearance. This stone had been in his family for decades, ever since his ancestor acquired it from a German immigrant who settled in Arkansas after the Civil War.
It was said that Sutton had cured numerous people of rabies with the Mad Stone, never accepting payment from anyone, as it was believed that such “magical” artifacts lose their efficacy if involved in monetary transactions.
The Healing Power of Sutton’s Stone was widely known not only in Missouri but also in other states, and many doctors attempted to purchase it from him, but he vowed never to sell it.
Sutton moistened the stone with fresh milk and carefully applied it to Adam’s wound for four or five minutes. When Sutton removed his hand, the stone remained attached to the wound, as if firmly adhered. According to Sutton, this was incontrovertible proof that the farmer was infected with rabies.
Then they simply waited. Hours passed. Six hours later, the stone fell off the wound by itself, after which Sutton washed it and placed it in a pot on the stove, filled with milk. As Sutton heated the milk, a green froth appeared on the surface, which, Sutton explained to the farmer, was rabies poison.
Sutton then applied the stone to the wound again, and this time it adhered for two hours. The process repeated a third time, with the stone staying attached for only 45 minutes. On the fourth attempt, the stone didn’t adhere at all—Sutton declared the farmer completely cured.
The Miracle Stone
This story is just one of many about the enigmatic Mad Stone, which purportedly healed those bitten by rabid animals. Some tales date back to the early American settlers. It was believed that the substance of this stone could draw out the “poison of rabies” from the wound.
What this substance was and where it came from remains unknown. In folklore, it was sometimes said that one could find this stone in the body of an albino deer and that it should be kept in a jar of fresh milk, with the milk needing to be changed daily to prevent it from souring.
In Walter Scott’s novel “The Talisman,” it was mentioned that the Mad Stone was brought by the Crusaders from Jerusalem. It was believed to cure fever and snake bites as well.
About Rabies
Throughout the centuries, rabies has been one of humanity’s greatest scourges. The renowned Muslim physician and philosopher of the 11th century, Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), referred to rabies as a “serious and poisonous melancholy” that affects the central nervous system, spreading from the point of contact along a one-way path to the brain.
The most common carriers of the rabies virus are dogs, foxes, raccoons, and in hot countries, bats. However, what terrifies people is not so much the fact that one can become infected but rather that this disease leads to death in almost 100% of cases if vaccination is not administered immediately.
Louis Pasteur invented the rabies vaccine in 1884. Before that, doctors attempted to treat the disease by cauterizing the wound with a piece of hot iron. The iron was heated until it glowed red-hot and then pressed against the wound. It was a form of torture, but if a person endured it, sometimes it indeed cured them.
Medical Kit for Cauterizing Wounds
Doctors still claim that this could work if such “treatment” is administered immediately after the bite of an infected animal, as there’s a chance to kill the virus at the infection site before it starts spreading through the nervous system.
Could the Mad Stone somehow also have been able to kill the rabies virus? However, there are definitely no stones in nature with such properties, so it might have been some other substance.
Treatment Rules
By the way, using the Mad Stone had to strictly adhere to certain rituals or rules, as if something magical was truly at play here. Apart from keeping it in fresh milk and not accepting payment for treatment, it was believed that it could only be used on humans; if used on animals, the stone would lose its power.
Also, the patient had to personally approach the owner of the Mad Stone and ask to be healed. If the owner of the Mad Stone traveled to the victim and treated them on their own initiative, the stone would not “work.”
The Lincoln Story
There’s a famous anecdote that Robert Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was bitten by a rabid dog. This happened in 1852. Immediately after the bite, Lincoln and Robert went to Indiana to find someone who possessed the Mad Stone. In 1931, Edgar Lee Masters described this episode in a biography of Lincoln:
“He believed in the Mad Stone, and one of his fiancées told that Lincoln took one of his sons to Terre Haute, Indiana, to apply the stone to a wound inflicted by a dog on the child.”
In 1936, historian Max Erman attempted to verify this story and found numerous second-hand accounts confirming that Lincoln did indeed come here in search of the Mad Stone. Considering that Robert Lincoln lived to the age of 82, the Mad Stone cured him.
What It Looks Like and Where It Comes From
It’s very difficult to understand what the stone looked like because there were different descriptions everywhere. Different people described it as various colors: mostly black, brown, gray, and intermediate shades.
Their size ranged from a few inches to that of a large pumpkin seed. They varied in thickness and width and came in a huge variety of shapes—the only common feature in all these stories was the ability of the Mad Stones to cure rabies.
It was claimed that they were found in the stomachs or hearts of deer, elk, bison—in general, ruminant animals, especially of white color. People believed that Mad Stones formed when a deer or other ruminant animal swallowed a foreign substance, which gradually became covered with layers of fur in the stomach, along with magnesium or ammonia phosphate.
“The Mad Stone is a mixture of plant substances and mucus, formed by nature’s whim in the small or second stomach of a hermaphrodite deer. It is designed in such a way that when applied to torn flesh, it immediately adheres, and each of its cells has an absorbing ability but does not absorb any substances other than the virus. Because the cells are too small in size to absorb even blood, which is too coarse and stiff to enter,” described one newspaper article.
In other words, the Mad Stone turned out to be a type of bezoar—a dense clump of hair and plant fibers formed in the stomachs of animals. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that bezoars could act as an antidote, and modern chemical analyses have shown that certain bezoars, when immersed in a solution containing arsenic, can indeed absorb poison from the liquid.
Why It Might Not Work
There are stories of the Mad Stone failing to cure the victim, but it was always pointed out that it happened due to the fault of the patient, not because the stone lost its power.
One man, bitten on the chin, died of rabies because his beard was too thick for the Mad Stone to properly adhere to the wound. Another person, bitten on the lips, accidentally swallowed some of the fluid from the bite site before the Mad Stone could take effect.
It was noted that Sutton’s famous stone, after 47 years of the priest’s work, saved more than 400 lives, failing only twice.
Strong Doubts
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, American newspapers were filled with stories of successful cures with the Mad Stone. For example, here’s one such story from the New York Times on June 19, 1885:
“William Stittl’s son from Mecklenburg County, who was severely bitten on the leg by a rabid dog, went to Charlotte to be treated by Mr. Butler. The stone adhered to his wound for two hours, and upon reapplication, for 30 minutes. The trial was witnessed by a doctor and several citizens.”
But now all these stories seem very dubious. Firstly, there are no stones or minerals capable of “sucking out” harmful substances from wounds. Secondly, rabies viruses do not manifest as green deposits. Thirdly, the stone could have adhered to the wound because of the milk in which it was stored—milk is sticky and adheres well to everything.
Fourthly, to definitively determine if an animal is infected with rabies, a thorough examination of its brain tissue under laboratory conditions is necessary. Strange behavior alone, including hydrophobia, is not a 100% determining symptom. So people who believed they were infected with rabies could have been mistaken.
But it’s easy to understand the strong belief in the Mad Stone, given the alternatives—painful cauterization or certain death. Moreover, the explanation of the stone’s mechanism of action as extracting poison suggests that believers thought it was more scientific than folk magic.
And yes, stories of the miracles of Mad Stones “strangely” faded away by the mid-20th century, when rabies vaccines became available and widely distributed.
A 19th-century illustration of a doctor examining a boy suffering from rabies.
