Snakestones: sources, samples and suppliers. An alexipharmic in the European medical market

Abstract

Focussing on the understudied area of non-herbal materia medica and using a highly interdisciplinary approach, this submission presents new and important conclusions regarding snakestones and their role in the European medical market, which fills multiple gaps in the current knowledge. Among its key findings, it provides the first categorisation of the different types of snakestone and identifies distinctive Scottish, Cornish and Welsh variants of the ‘snakestone bead’ folklore. It considers in depth the history, folklore and purported therapeutic uses of snakestones across Europe. Snakestones are also used as a vehicle by which aspects of the wider history of medicine and pharmacy, and connections with other fields of historical research, are explored. This work considers the role of snakestones in the Early Modern medical market; it examines snakestones themselves from an object-remedy perspective, as well as evaluating the scale and manner of their transmission. Previously unpublished archival evidence affords an opportunity to examine the circumstances in which a single snakestone was transmitted from Indonesia to England, and in so doing, explores the ways in which scientific societies sought information about overseas flora, fauna and phenomena, as well as how they obtained samples for their collections. This thesis also explores the interplay between overseas materia medica as a source of academic study, practical medical use, collection and display. This work provides new and important insights into snakestones as a remedy, complementing and extending existing scholarship surrounding Early Modern pharmaceuticals, as well as into snakebite treatments; the Early Modern medical marketplace; the interplay between natural and supernatural ailments and their treatments; scientific societies and their networks; the circulation of materia medica; and the role of medicine in the history of collecting.