Bloodletting Essay

Bloodletting is one of the oldest procedures in our society. It goes all the way back to thousands of years ago and many different cultures used it. Considered one of medicine’s oldest practices, bloodletting is thought to have originated in ancient Egypt. It then spread to Greece, where physicians such as Erasistratus, who lived in the third century B.C., believed that all illnesses stemmed from an overabundance of blood, or plethora. In the second century A.D., the influential Galen of Pergamum expanded on Hippocrates’ earlier theory that good health required a perfect balance of the four humors, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. His writings and teachings made bloodletting a common technique throughout the Roman Empire. Before long it went to in India and the Arab world too.

In medieval Europe, bloodletting became the standard treatment for various conditions, from plague and smallpox to epilepsy and gout. Practitioners usually nicked veins or arteries in the forearm or neck, sometimes using a special tool featuring a fixed blade and known as a fleam. In 1163 a church edict prohibited monks and priests, who often stood in as doctors, from performing bloodletting, stating that the church banned the procedure. This was partly in response to this injunction, barbers began offering a range of services that included bloodletting, cupping, tooth extractions, lancing and even amputations along with, of course, trims and shaves, I thought this was quite comical.

The Aztecs, Mayans, Mesopotamians, and Egyptians all were cultures who used this procedure. The purpose of bloodletting was to relieve someone’s pain from their sickness. Examples of some of the sickness generally included something as major as leprosy to something as ...

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...ore they happen. Blood donation is the more common name for bloodletting but there is a practice that is ancient but never really went away. That is the use of leeches. Leeches are still used today to help in certain illnesses and injuries. For example, doctors still use leeches in helping to reattach body parts such as toes and fingers. The reason why using leeches is effective in this process is because leeches help in ridding any extra blood that could cause problems to the patient later on in their lifetime.

Although Phlebotomy is almost never used anymore, except for certain extremely rare conditions. One is hemochromatosis, which is a genetic condition affecting 600,000 to 1,000,000 Americans in which the body stores too much iron. One way to treat this is to periodically drain some of their iron-rich blood, which restores the mineral's proper balance.