Bezoars Apothecary Label

Description

You may be familiar with bezoars from a certain popular wizard series (and, by the way, if you’re thinking of doing a themed apothecary, bezoars would fit right in a Potions apothecary cabinet!). While many of the magical potion ingredients in that story are the invention of the author’s prodigious imagination, bezoars actually have a rich history in folklore and early medicine.

Bezoars are a hard, rocklike mineral accretion that form in the guts of some very unlucky animals, and even in some humans! You know how a pearl forms around a bit of sand in an oyster? Bezoars are like the gross, ugly version of a pearl that come from intestines! They were discovered in ancient times in the guts of animals being sacrificed, and I guess some very inventive person saw one and decided “this is bizarre and nasty, I will market it as medicine!”

Arabian doctors were prescribing bezoars for hundreds of years before it seeped into European medicine, probably due to a combination of Islamic expansion into Spain and the Crusades. The European nobility were busily trying to assassinate each other with arsenic. Lo and behold, there was a market for a magical cure-all!  Bezoars were prescribed for everything from leprosy to depression, but most famously, as an antidote to poisoning. 

Bezoars were so highly prized that they were worth ten times their weight in gold. Queen Elizabeth even had one set in a silver ring! Because they were so rare and expensive, Jesuit priests in India decided to get in on this lucrative scheme and manufacture their own. Known as Goa stones (because they were made in Goa, India), they were made by rolling crushed up shells, amber, and sometimes gemstones or bits of real bezoars all together in a ball with silt (fine mud) and resin. Yummy.

So how did you use this delightful ball of intestinal detritus? Well, there were options. You could wear it like a charm, drop it in your drink if you suspected it was poisoned, or my personal favorite, grind it up and eat that nasty powder. People were doing this until 1575, when a French surgeon, Ambroise Paré, finally decided to debunk bezoars once and for all. He’d caught his chef stealing, and since the penalty was death, Paré offered the unfortunate cook a deal: he could be hanged, or, if he would take some poison, he would immediately be provided with a bezoar. Apparently the cook had a lot of faith in bezoars, because he chose the poison option, and died an agonizing death hours later, in spite of the bezoar. It was disproved once and for all.

So if you need a good label for a Poisons and Antidotes apothecary cabinet, or a wizarding-story-that-must-not-be-named themed apothecary, look no further. These stickers are easy to apply, and come in opaque and translucent options. We also have water-resistant and outdoor apothecary labels coming soon!

Available types:

• White border, opaque label (for a classic sticker look)
• Clear border, translucent label (the border is almost invisible, and the label is slightly see-through)

Repositionable: Yes (but the tackiness will be reduced with each repositioning)

Waterproof: No

Care: Clean with a dry cloth and wipe gently from the center outward.