Joanna Stephens's Cure for Bladder Stones

Column by Jonathan Charles Goddard, Consultant Urological Surgeon and Curator of the BAUS Virtual Museum of the History of Urology, confirmed as the Sep/Oct 2013 entry in BAUS's own 'Urology News Articles' index (baus.org.uk/museum/149/urology_news_articles). Directly read via PDF: records Stephens as daughter of a gentleman of good estate and family in Berkshire, the 1738 Gentleman's Magazine article, the failed 1,356-pound-3-shilling private subscription, the Parliamentary committee of 22 doctors/politicians/scientists that examined four stone-sufferers and found them cured, the 5,000-pound reward (Goddard's own estimate: roughly 650,000 pounds today), publication in the London Gazette on 16 June 1739, and the exact three-part recipe (powder of eggshells and snails; decoction of herbs, soap, swine's cress, and honey; pills of snails, wild carrot seeds, burdock seeds, ash keys, hips, haws, soap, and honey). Goddard's own professional verdict, as a practicing urologist: the remedy would have worked for some patients because alkaline soap dissolves urate stones, but the marketed claim was for a universal cure, and the episode's larger significance was that it stimulated the pursuit of chemical analysis of stones via Alexander Marcet's later six-type stone classification, which Goddard credits as part of the basis of modern medical biochemistry. (Quoted phrases here are paraphrased rather than verbatim-quoted because this source is a PDF the mechanical verify-quotes web-fetcher cannot reliably parse; the underlying facts are independently corroborated by baus-museum-joanna-stephens-page and wellcome-story-morris-2019, both fetched as plain HTML.)