140 



SCIENCE 



[N. 8. Vol. XLII. No. 1074 



William Jenner, Sir William Gull, Bennet 

 and others in England, Strambio, Angelo, 

 Meli in Italy, and Jackson in our own 

 country, and many others in all of these 

 countries. 



But what finally led to the entire aboli- 

 tion of bleeding after the middle of the past 

 century was not so much the opposition of 

 clinicians who failed by its use to abort 

 pneumonia ("the queen of inflammations," 

 as Dietl calls it) or some other acute dis- 

 ease, but the rise of new theories of disease, 

 based on discoveries of fundamental impor- 

 tance. The rise of the cell-theory and of 

 cellular pathology, the discovery of bac- 

 teria and their connection with the inflam- 

 matory process of the infectious diseases, 

 the appearance of hydrotherapy, the ex- 

 pectant medicine of the school of Skoda and 

 Oppolzer, new and quicker methods of ob- 

 taining the effects of drugs, as by means of 

 the hypodermic syringe, the discovery of 

 new hypnotics, of the analgesics and anes- 

 thetics, altered the views of medical theo- 

 rists and practitioners alike and inevitably 

 led to the downfall of the theories on which 

 venesection had been based. 



During a period of study of six and a 

 half years, from 1884 to 1891, as a student 

 of chemistry and medicine in several of the 

 larger medical centers of Germany, Austria 

 and Switzerland, I never once saw a patient 

 bled in clinic or hospital. The procedure 

 may have been employed now and then, but 

 so little stress was laid upon it that it was 

 not thought worth while to demonstrate it 

 to the young men who walked the wards.^^ 



the profession to throw doubt upon indiscriminate 

 bloodletting." D'Arcy Power, "Dr. Marshall 

 Hall and the Decay of Bloodletting," The Fracti- 

 tioner, 1909, Vol. 32, p. 320. 



11 See also F. de Havilland Hall, The "Westmin- 

 ster Hospital Eeports, Vol. XVII., p. 1, 1911, who 

 make the following statement in a clinical lecture 

 on bloodletting: "To such an extent had bleeding 

 been discarded that during my student days at St. 



Bleeding did not disappear, however, 

 from the world. The common man, espe- 

 cially in Germany and France, still held 

 firmly that benefits did follow the use of the 

 wet cup, the lancet and the leech. Tena- 

 ciously the old practises were upheld. If 

 physicians refused to bleed, there was al- 

 ways the barber surgeon, full}'' competent, 

 as in teeth pulling, to give relief. I re- 

 member that in my boyhood in Ohio the 

 practise of blood-letting in the spring of 

 the year was in vogue among the farm 

 laborers from southern Germany. After 

 their return from a visit to their barber 

 surgeon in the town the scarified backs were 

 exhibited as a special favor, and irrefutable 

 arguments advanced in respect to the bene- 

 fits of bleeding either to ward off disease 

 or to improve nutrition. Was it not true 

 and known to all stock-breeders that the 

 domestic animals could be fattened by 

 judicious bleeding at certain fixed intervals ? 



And it appears now that the common 

 man was right, after all. An empirical 

 method of treatment which has been prac- 

 tised by nearly all races since before the 

 day of Hippocrates almost certainly eon- 

 tains a basis of truth. This is now admitted, 

 and physicians are again saving lives by 

 the judicious and timely use of blood- 

 letting. Says the experienced Sir T. 

 Lauder Brunton: 



Blood-letting not only relieves symptoms, but may 

 save the patient 's life, as in engorged conditions of 

 the right heart, whether due to mitral incompetence 

 or pulmonary affections.i^ 



Bartholomew 's Hospital, I never heard of a patient 

 being bled, so that I was quite taken back, when 

 shortly after I was appointed House Surgeon at a 

 country hospital, the Senior Surgeon came to me to 

 be bled. Indeed, in 1892 when I requested a mem- 

 ber of the Surgical Staff at St. Bartholomew's to 

 bleed a patient for me, he told me that this was 

 the first time he had ever been called upon to per- 

 form phlebotomy." 



12 On the use of leeches in relieving overdisten- 

 sion of the right heart, in cases of pneumonia, see 



