Claim · 1738 · Joanna Stephens's Medicine for the Stone
Joanna Stephens's medicine was marketed as an infallible cure for the stone, without limitation to any particular type of stone.
The 1738 Gentleman’s Magazine article that first drew national attention to Stephens’s cure, and her own offer to sell the recipe for 5,000 pounds, treated the medicine as a general solvent for the stone, not a remedy limited to one stone type or one class of patient. In 1739, a competing pamphlet was published specifically “to prove that it cannot be a specific for the stone,” and the modern institutional retrospective verdict (Wellcome Collection, 2019) is that the medicine “turned out to be entirely useless.” Edward Keyes’s own 1942 retrospective title for the episode was “A Faith That Failed.”
Appears in
Sources
- The extraction of the excruciating bladder stones — Thomas Morris, The extraction of the excruciating bladder stones, Wellcome Collection Stories, 19 September 2019.
- A New Treatise on the Stone — [Dennis de Coetlogon], A New Treatise on the Stone: Containing the Causes Both Remote and Immediate. The Indications, Counter-Indications, and the Prognostick. With an Exact Analysis of the Different Preparations of Mrs. Stephen's Medicines, to Prove that It Cannot Be a Specific for the Stone (London: Printed for J. Brett, [1739?]).
- The Joanna Stephens Medicines for the Stone: A Faith That Failed — Edward L. Keyes, The Joanna Stephens Medicines for the Stone: A Faith That Failed, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 18, no. 12 (December 1942): 835-840.