The Mad Stone, the One-Time 'Cure' for Rabies

According to Wikipedia there are no documented cases of human to human transmission by biting, and the only recorded cases of transmission from one human to another were inadvertent via organ transplant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies#Transmission

However, another mechanism comes to mind that would permit the existence of madstones: Note that they were often organic in nature and note the milk bit. I'm thinking of some very heat tolerant bacteria living in the material, boiling it in milk will give it a nutrient-rich liquid basically devoid of other pathogens. Suppose said bacteria exhibits a surface antigen matching some part of the rabies virus?

You can make a vaccine by exhibiting the target structure on a harmless pathogen. (Case in point, Sputnik V. It's not usually done because such a vaccine also makes the patient immune to the vaccine--Sputnik V primary dose and booster dose were separate things because of this.) And how does a bacteria come to exhibit this? There's plenty of viral code embedded in our DNA, the same thing could happen to a bacteria.

While this is obviously a low-probability scenario I don't see that it can be ruled out. There are an awful lot of pathogens out there that don't cause obvious symptoms and thus have never been studied. (Sometimes they cause non-obvious symptoms, though--think of HPV and cancer for the well-known case but there are others. Personally, I suspect that we have only scratched the surface on this.)

The more popular 19th century technique was to cut out all the flesh from that area, which didn't work either. Amputations were done too, but those didn't work. Our modern understanding is that the success stories were because the person never contacted rabies in the first place.

Rabies is a great argument against pet ownership, which would have vastly cut down on urban rabies as they came almost exclusively from feral dogs.

Also this article sort of plays down how desperate and non-sensical rabies treatments have been through history. It opens up this pandering narrative of "what if this stone worked somehow?" But its just as false as any other treatment. Sadly, these treatments were signs of desperation. It must have been horrific to be bitten before modern medicine. Even sadder, the patients who didnt respond to miracle cures were murdered by the staff trying to cure them, which seemed to be the only "real" treatment. Adults and children were murdered in cold blood by these "healers." Regardless of the ethics of rabies treatments and euthanasia, this is still murder due to the legalities and the arbitrary decision when to kill the patient. These people were killed often without explicit notification and approval of law, family, etc. It was just something that was allowed and when family dropped off their sick there, it was assumed they'd never see them again. The killings were brutal. Adults and children shoved between two mattresses as staff held them down so they asphyxiated. Or stabbed and left to bleed out.

There poor souls were essentially dropped off to "healers" who tortured them and murdered them when the tortures didn't work.

I imagine the stone was popular because your other alternatives were extremely gruesome.

This paper goes into the historic treatments and is interesting to read:

Prevention and treatment otherwise made no significant progress. Medical or surgical management delineated in Ancient Greece or Rome became increasingly tinted with religion. In Europe a miracle cure was deemed to be found at several specialized religious sites [51], such as the church of the village of Andage, renamed Saint-Hubert, where Louis I the Pious, one of Charlemagne’s sons and his successor, authorized the transfer of the eponymous saint’s thighbones in 826 CE. This abbey located near Liège, Belgium became a specialized center for rabies prevention. At the time, prevention before a bite took the form of applying a white-hot Key of Saint Hubert to dogs so they would not contract the disease [52,53]. An example of this amulet can be seen at http://www.webcitation.org/6os1x82Ty. Contrary to what was practiced in other reputed sites such as San Bellino [17], near present-day Rovigo in Italy, or in Saint-Tügen’s chapel in Primelin, France, this method must have been considered too cruel or too unreliable in humans bitten by suspected rabid animals. In humans, the preferred method of rabies prevention after a bite was based on incision of the forehead and implantation of threads from the Saint’s supposedly miraculous stole, accompanied by prayers and fasting [19,25,52,53,54]. In spite of Ambroise Paré—who after the siege of Turin in 1536 discontinued the practice of cauterization to heal wounds [55,56]—Dioscorides’ and Celsus’ cauterization approach remained widespread in the management of rabies risks well into the 19thC [31,57]. This may be because cauterization was performed to inactivate a “poison” and perhaps also because their work was never lost to practitioners in Europe in spite of the fall of the Roman Empire [58,59]. Patients, however, found little recourse should prevention fail: at Saint-Tügen chapel, patients with declared rabies were stifled between mattresses until the beginning of the 19thC.

The understanding of post-bite rabies prevention in animals or in humans, however, still made no progress. Published on 17 June 1684, the first edition of Medicina Curiosa, the first English-language journal wholly dedicated to medicine, describes post-exposure prevention failure in a suspected human case of rabies acquired from a cat [89]. “Treatment” after a bite remained faith-based [90] or otherwise fanciful, based for example on applying hair of the biting dog (“hair of the dog”) to the wound [28,66] or omelets flavored with “dog-rose root” (Rosa canina or cynorrhodon, as already suggested by Pliny the Elder in the 1stC CE) [91,92,93,94,95]. The same was true outside Europe [96]. Suggested therapies—some even based on homeopathic approaches—were rightly criticized as ineffective [97]. The fact that rabies is not transmitted in all cases even after the bite of an evidently rabid dog or wolf contributed to the illusion that each of the many preventive “treatments” had been effective.

These are all too easily disparaged as ludicrous recommendations made by self-assured and pompous clinicians, steeped from old-wives’ remedies. They are, however, sure signs of desperate and all-out efforts by health providers of the time to save their patients from what to this day remains an intractable disease. Vigorous approaches continued to be used well into the mid-19thC: In 1830s London, children bitten by potentially rabid dogs still underwent surgery or cauterization of the wound [57] (still discussed by Babes in 1912 [72]). Patients with clinically declared rabies were plunged into cold water or hot oil as recommended by Celsus [31,86], or were later euthanized by being stifled between mattresses or made to bleed to death [17,90,98,99].

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082082/