3/2025 - An Innocent Scientist (Vol. 1, No. 1)

Hanna Saadah, MD, FACP — Professor Emeritus of Internal Medicine, specializing in Infectious Diseases and Geriatrics

Professor Saadah

I was ten-years old, playing with my friends at hunting lizards in the hills around my Lebanese hometown.  We were using slingshots that we had made out of inner tubes of old car tires.  One of my friends, Nazeeh, could not use the slingshot because holding and pulling on it made the warts on his fingers bleed.

I asked my gynecologist mother and surgeon father to help Nazeeh.  They took him to a dermatologist in Tripoli, who treated him three times, but the warts got worse instead of better.  I complained to my old aunt who suggested seeking help from Elias, the village wart healer, alcoholic, and dairy farmer.

We walked all the way to Elias’s dairy, tucked in the hills.  He only had three cows, and when we showed up, he looked at us with bulging eyes and said, “Who has the warts?”  We pointed to Nazeeh.  “You have a lot of warts,” he said after examining Nazeeh’s hands.  “Go down to the creek and fetch me a big-fat frog,” he ordered, addressing us all.

When we could not find a frog, he got up from his milking stool, went down to the creek, and caught a frog that was hiding under the creek’s edge.  Then, he pasted the frog’s belly slime on Nazeeh’s warts, told him not to wash his hands, and asked us to return the next day.

He did the same thing the next day, the third day, and asked us to return in a week.  When we returned, the warts had dried and fallen off.  When I told my mother and father, they just said that wars are known to come and go for no reason.

Forty years later, when I became an infectious disease specialist, a research article appeared in one of my infectious-disease journals.  The article provided evidence that frog-belly slime has strong antimicrobial and antiviral properties.

The memory of Elias, curing Nazeeh’s warts with frog-belly slime, brought tears to my eyes.  Elias, my hometown’s wart healer, was ahead of his time by about forty years.

White-Willow Bark (Salix alba) was known to help fever and pain, for more than 5 thousand years, before Charles Frédéric Gerhardt in 1853 discovered that it contained aspirin.  A 5000 BC stone tablet from Ur, Sumer, stated that White-Willow Bark had Analgesic, Antipyretic, Anti-inflammatory properties.  Smallpox vaccine was developed by dairy farmers when their milkmaids did not develop cow pox on their hands.

Often, laymen’s observations can pave the way to scientific discoveries.