Joanna Stephens's Medicine for the Stone

A recipe its own promoter called an infallible solvent for the stone, of any kind, kept secret until Parliament paid 5,000 pounds for its full public disclosure in 1739.

No source in this bundle documents a controlled clinical trial of the medicine, in 1739 or since; none could have existed before modern trial methodology. What survives is a set of contemporaneous eighteenth-century examinations and a modern retrospective verdict. Parliament's own committee examined four stone-sufferers before and after treatment and judged them cured -- a one-time clinical judgment, not an independently replicated result. Stephen Hales examined the medicine's actual dissolving power in a dedicated 1740 pamphlet. The Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris separately examined the medicine, its findings extracted into English by Richard Gem in 1741. In 1739, a competing pamphlet was published specifically to prove the medicine 'cannot be a specific for the stone,' and a second 1740 tract re-examined David Hartley's nine original case reports 'in a very different Manner.' The modern institutional retrospective verdict is direct: the Wellcome Collection's own 2019 account states the recipe 'turned out to be entirely useless,' and Edward Keyes's 1942 retrospective for the New York Academy of Medicine titled the whole episode 'A Faith That Failed.' There is a genuine, narrow kernel of chemistry inside the failed universal claim: modern nephrology confirms that alkali therapy in general can dissolve an existing pure uric-acid (urate) stone by raising urine pH, but has no dissolving action on a calcium-containing stone such as calcium oxalate -- one of several distinct stone types later distinguished by Alexander Marcet's chemical analyses of calculi. A 2013 professional urological assessment attributes this same alkali mechanism specifically to the recipe's soap; no source in this bundle independently confirms that Stephens's particular undosed preparation achieved therapeutic urinary alkalinization in any recorded patient. Even granting that attribution, a recipe marketed and paid for as a universal solvent for 'the stone,' with no distinction by stone type, could not have delivered on that promise even on the most favorable reading of its one candidate ingredient.