Lithic Encrustations and Embodied “Quarries of Stones”

Abstract

Abstract “Lithic Encrustations and Embodied “Quarries of Stones” considers how the growth of bodily calculi—the kidney stone in humans and the bezoar stone in animals—expands anatomical geography into the mineral realm. Lithic and fleshly conversions enact an “exterranean” (Phillip Usher) process that visibly demonstrates a stone–human continuum. Various theories for performing a lithotomy conjoined occult, medical, and popular homiletic wisdom to exterranean extraction, and kidney stones joined other rare curiosities such as unicorn horns and bezoar stones in collections. Bezoar stones, like kidney stones, grow from organic bodies, and both were believed to be a nostrum for a variety of diseases, physical and spiritual. The bezoar stone’s alleged transformative powers of conversion made it comparable to a Philosopher’s Stone or even to Christ, who might cure a sick body and save a hard-hearted human. These lithic bodily byproducts offer an accessible form of proof that biological life has a mineral capacity.