The Curious Case of Agenor Andrade Filho or The Invisble Stones Episode

March 1958. On four successive visits to the hospital emergency ward, Agenor complained of continued severe lower back pain. The staff, all too aware of his hypochondriac tendencies, advised him to go home and take some pain killers. On the fourth visit, x-rays were taken, but showed nothing out of the ordinary in terms of organs, muscle or bone. A week later, Agenor returned to the ER with a high fever and clear signs of organ failure. The medical team, led by Dr. Emilio Bonelli, was forced to perform emergency surgery. To their surprise, they found two massive stones, one in each kidney, the removal of which drastically and unexpectedly prolonged the patient’s time on the operating table. Sadly, Agenor succumbed to generalised post-operative infection and died.
Along with a full report, Dr. Bonelli sent the extracted stones to the coroner, who called him straight back to say that the vial he had sent was empty.
Upon second inspection, Bonelli was amazed to concur that the vial did indeed seem empty, but that, when shaken, something clearly rattled against the glass. After some tests, Dr. Emilio Bonelli could only conclude that Agenor’s severe hypochondria had materialised as two objects possessed of material properties, but invisible to the naked eye unless submerged in liquid.
This incredible discovery, the theme of a lecture delivered at the 3rd Nephrology Congress at the Paulista Academy of Medicine, made a splash in the specialist journals and the tabloid press to the huge embarrassment of the hospital board, which demanded that the surgeons drop the case immediately under pain of dismissal. Not another word was to be said about Agenor’s kidney stones. These documents, like the stones themselves, were rediscovered in 2013 in an underground vault at the Matarazzo Hospital.