What was bloodletting used for

At the end of the s leeches were a low-priced commodity. The cultivation of leeches by leech farmers or medical facilities became a thriving industry, and the import of leeches also increased rapidly during this time.

Some research suggests that France imported about 42 million leeches in one year. When they were in short supply, techniques were developed to extend the use of a single leech. Immersing the leech in vinegar or applying salt to its mouth would cause the animals to disgorge, allowing them to be reused. Multiple leeches were used; early records show that over leeches were sometimes applied to a single patient over a few days. In , Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis was one of the first physicians to openly criticize bloodletting for the treatment of diseases.

He deduced that those patients bled later had already passed through the worst phases of the disease and that bloodletting was thus useless in the treatment of pneumonia.

By the s, bloodletting was so popular among patients that, although medical use of the practice was declining, many patients had to be convinced not to be bled when they fell ill.

In June , the FDA cleared the first application for leeches to be used in modern medicine as medical devices. Surgeons who do plastic and reconstructive surgery find leeches valuable when regrafting amputated appendages.

Once found beneficial for the amount of blood they could withdraw, leeches are useful now for the anticlotting agent hirudin, contained in their saliva, which keeps blood flowing freely during these procedures. Healio News Cardiology. Issue: September Read next. Magazine How one image captures 21 hours of a volcanic eruption. Science Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants.

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See how people have imagined life on Mars through history. See More. Similar medical illustrations and practices extended as far as South Asia and the Middle East. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, bloodletting had become so common a therapy that barber-surgeons practiced it.

In 18th-century Europe , surgeons continued to use bloodletting as a treatment for fever , hypertension high blood pressure , inflammation of the lungs, and pulmonary edema excess fluid in the lungs. Some physicians had even wider uses for this allegedly therapeutic method.

For example, John Hunter — one of the forefathers of modern surgery — described various other uses for bloodletting, including in the treatment of smallpox or gonorrhea. Bloodletting was still fairly common throughout the 19th century, though by the start of the 20th century, it was gradually becoming unpopular with both the medical community and the public at large.

Copeman, wrote :. Bloodletting started to lose ground in part thanks to the work of French physician Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis , who began questionning this therapeutic method in the s. His conclusion, again and again, was that there was not enough evidence in support of the idea that withdrawing blood could improve health. Despite the fact that doctors no longer prescribe bloodletting, the practice has not died out entirely. In some communities around the world , there are people who still believe that this practice can help cure all sorts of ailments and diseases.

Leech therapy has also persisted in alternative medicine, with some arguing that it can help improve blood flow and may even have an antitumor effect. Throughout history, bloodletting has been paired closely with an interest in the various functions of the human body. By looking into how changing the volume of blood in the body might affect its health, doctors eventually came to understand more and more about blood circulation, the importance of blood to health, and the characteristics of blood.

However, it took European scholars another years or so to learn about circulation. Doctors in Europe started to practice blood transfusions as early as the s, as they were aware of the dangers of blood loss. However, for many centuries, they lacked the knowledge that there are different blood groups with different compatibilities, which affects the success of blood transfusions.

It was Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner who, in , first discovered and described different blood groups, making blood transfusion a viable therapy.

For his contribution to the field of medicine, Landsteiner received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in Nowadays, each year sees the collection of approximately