پادزهر

A bezoar is a calcified concretion that forms in the gastrointestinal tract of certain animals, particularly the bezoar goat (Capra aegagrus) of Persia and the Andes vicuña and llama. The word comes directly from the Persian pādzahr — a compound of pād (protector, guard, against) and zahr (poison) — meaning 'antidote' or literally 'poison-protector.' In Persian medicine, bezoar stones were among the most prized substances in the pharmacopoeia: ground into powder and dissolved in liquid, they were believed to neutralize any poison, cure plague, and protect against numerous diseases. The stone's reputation was based on real chemistry — some bezoars do contain calcium phosphate and other compounds that can adsorb certain toxins — though the medieval claims of universal antidotal power were vastly exaggerated.

Persian medical tradition transmitted the bezoar into the Islamic pharmacopoeia, where Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine (11th century CE) describes it extensively and credits it with remarkable protective powers. From Arabic medicine (where it was called bāzahr, from Persian), the bezoar entered the European medical tradition through the great translation movement of the 11th–13th centuries, when Arabic medical texts were rendered into Latin in Toledo and other translation centers. By the 14th century, bezoars had become one of the most expensive items in European royal pharmacies. Queen Elizabeth I of England owned a bezoar set in gold; European monarchs commissioned elaborately jeweled bezoar cups (bezoardosen) in which the stone was mounted so that wine poured through it would be 'purified' of poison.

The bezoar's decline came from an unlikely source: the French surgeon Ambroise Paré, who in 1575 proposed testing the stone's powers on a condemned criminal. The man was given poison followed by bezoar powder — and died anyway, definitively demonstrating that the stone's universal antidotal reputation was false. Paré's empirical test was one of the earliest examples of controlled pharmacological experimentation in European medicine. The word 'bezoar' survived the debunking of the substance's powers — it remains in use in medicine to describe the calcified masses that can form in patients' stomachs. Harry Potter fans will also know it as the stone that saves Ron Weasley from poisoning in Book 6, J.K. Rowling having done her etymological homework.