284 PRIMITIVE LEECHCRAFT 



It is small cause for wonder that within a few days of 

 this discipline Queen Caroline breathed her last. 



The Saxons used the lancet at frightful haphazard, 

 except that they were positive about the right time of 

 year. In an old leech-book written by one Gild (pro- 

 bably only a clerk writing from dictation) for the Abbey 

 of Glastonbury, much stress is laid on the risk of blood- 

 letting fifteen nights before Lammas (August 1st), and 

 after it for five-and-thirty nights, because the ' lyft ' (air) 

 is then most impure. Herein is a trace of Mediterranean 

 lore, from a latitude where men had learned, to dread the 

 sirocco. But there is an appalling vagueness in directions 

 for the operation : 



' Let him blood from the left arm from the upper vein ; if 

 thou canst not find that [gif thu tha findan ne mcege], from the 

 midmost vein ; if thou canst not find that, then from the head 

 vein. Further, if that cannot be found, let blood from the left 

 hand, from a vein near the little finger. If the blood be very 

 red or livid, then must it be let more plentifully ; if it be clean 

 or clear, let it so much the less.' 



Evidently this eminent surgeon did not know the vital 

 difference between arterial and venous blood, and his 

 diagnosis was based on the quality of the blood, differing 

 accordingly as he had tapped a vein or an artery ! 



It is horrible to think that blood-letting was pronounced 

 indispensable in the 'half-dead addle,' as the Anglo- 

 Saxons called paralysis, in order to draw forth the 

 poisonous humours from the patient. This theory of 

 humours died very hard in medicine; it drove bravely 

 through the eighteenth century. 



There was, of course, no distinction till long after the 

 Norman Conquest between surgeons and physicians: 



