Bloodletting is Back, Baby!
Believe it or not, bloodletting is one of the oldest medical practices! It’s been done with everything from leaches to “sharpened sticks, shark’s teeth, and miniature bows and arrows”, writes Sharon Moalem in her terrific book, Survival of the Sickest . In fact, many medical books were written on how (and how much) to draw blood! So what was the basis for this “treatment”? Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his masterpiece, The Emperor of All Maladies , tells about Hippocrates who came up with the theory of four bodily fluids termed “humors”: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. Any illness, he said, was due to the excess of one of those fluids. In AD 160, the physician Claudius Galen associated most of the known illnesses with specific “humors”. It followed that if certain illness were “caused” by the excess of blood, then the logical solution would be to… bleed the person! But wait, it gets even better (or worse). You can’t just bleed a person anywhere, writes Mukherjee: “If...