These Clumps of Undigested Food Used To Be Medicinal Charms

When you get right down to it, a body like ours is basically a bony scaffold that a strange collection of organs, interconnected by a complex entanglement of piping, hangs on. In some of these pipes, clumps of gunk can form and create blockages. A bezoar is one such clump, consisting of ingested—but not sufficiently digested—material, of widely varying composition, that forms and persists somewhere it shouldn’t, usually the stomach or small intestine. 

Somewhere along the line, folks got it into their heads that bezoars were a powerful antidote against any poison.