President Lincoln AND THE MAD STONES

More terrifying than any werewolf to 19th-century America was its real-life counterpart: hydrophobia. Rabies.

- BY L.A. BERRY

An 1867 lithograph of Abraham and Mary Lincoln with sons Robert (left) and Thomas 'Tad' (right) by Currier and Ives Wikipedia Public Domain/ US Library of Congress

By the time Abraham Lincoln assumed the U.S. presidency (1861-1865), rabies had spread to near-epidemic proportions in some cities and western territories. Once a victim showed symptoms, there was no cure to halt an agonizing end. Even more bitterly, among its primary carriers was man's best friend - the family dog.

“Rabies was initially a disease carried by domestic dogs, a problem brought to all of North America by European settlers in the 1700s,” said the NYS Department of Health's Wadsworth Center in its online Rabies-History.

“Hydrophobia had long been a dreaded epidemic in Europe and was closely associated with the folklore of vampires and werewolves,” noted the May 11, 2023, “Rabies on the Frontier” medical history post on Notes From the Frontier blog. “Americans were hysterical with fear. The press reported incidents with lurid detail. A Santa Clara newspaper reported a hotel guest in a Saratoga, California hotel being bitten by a rapid dog, but the paper said, she showed great fortitude by cauterizing the wound herself with a hot iron.”

With werewolves to the left of him and civil war to the right, Lincoln was stuck in the middle with rabies. So when it's terror arrived at his own family's doorstep, he turned—as any desperate father might have—to mad stones.

Bezoar stones on display in the German Pharmacy Museum in Heidelberg Castle, 2008 photo by Gerhard Elsner Wikipedia Creative Commons

MAGICAL MAD STONES