Essay On Bloodletting

When researching the history of phlebotomy you’d be surprise about what shows up when you click search. When I think of phlebotomy the only thing that comes to mind is needles, but that’s only because I’m terrified of needles. In the ancient times there were a lot of different and unusual ways used to extract blood from a person. It almost makes me very thankful that in our century we found a more efficient, safe, and not so painful way to extract blood from a person, but I still don’t like needles.

Bloodletting was one of the many techniques in ancient times. It was and old medical practice that was used thousands of years ago. Bloodletting is basically “The withdrawal of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease”1. The person would be pierced or cut and then drained until they fainted. Bloodlettings medical treatment was always based off of four body humors blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Bloodletting was actually called bloodletting about 2000 B.C, my research showed that Hwang-Ti, the Emperor of china “was the first to recognize the importance of veins and arteries in 2650 B.C”.*2.

Benjamin Rush who is one of the many signers of the Declaration of Independence who recommended bloodletting. Which in fact because bloodletting was migrated to America, our first President George Washington was suffering from a throat infection. George Washington agreed with the medical practice bloodletting, he believed that it cured him from past aliments. Sadly George Washington died after draining 3.75 liters of blood. In the 19th Century leeches was also used to drain blood from a patient. In the 1830s France imported 40 million leeches for bloodletting. “A French physician, Joseph-Victor Broussais recommended his patients to be treated with 50 leeches at a time”3. In France per year 5 to 6 million leeches were