The open body closed: a rationale for the abandonment of bloodletting
Historical review published in Soc Hist Med (2024)
Abstract
This article contains an analysis of the use and abandonment of bloodletting in Sweden 1820-1900. Close readings of over 8,000 yearly reports by Swedish provincial doctors and popular medical handbooks, journals and notes from medical societies have been used, as well as key word searches meant to illustrate overarching tendencies. One result is that quantitative balance between humours was not an aim of therapeutic bleeding in this context. Rather, bloodletting was mainly used to reinstate regular flows in a hydraulic model of the body. It is argued that a shift from focusing on smooth flows to seeing bleeding as blood loss marked a transformation of the medical imagination from working with an 'open', malleable body to a 'closed', fixed body. This helps explain why therapeutic bleeding, for millennia the most important practice in medical practitioners' arsenal, was silently abandoned decades before the breakthrough of bacteriology and scientific medicine.
Abstract sourced from PubMed (NCBI) for the cited record. See the original publication for the authoritative version.
Resumen
Historical analysis of the rationale for abandoning bloodletting in modern medicine.
Por qué esto importa para la hirudoterapia
This article analyzes the use and abandonment of bloodletting in Sweden from 1820 to 1900, drawing on over 8,000 provincial doctor reports, medical handbooks, journals, and medical society notes. The author argues that therapeutic bleeding was primarily aimed at reinstating regular flows in a hydraulic model of the body rather than balancing humours quantitatively, and that a conceptual shift from 'flow restoration' to 'blood loss' explains bloodletting's abandonment before the rise of bacteriology. CAVEAT: No leeches or hirudotherapy are specifically mentioned; the relevance to ASH is purely historical through the broader bloodletting tradition, and the connection to the leech secretome is indirect at best.
Citación
The open body closed: a rationale for the abandonment of bloodletting.
Drakman et al. · Social history of medicine, 2024
Contexto clínico relacionado
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Añadido a la biblioteca ASH: May 27, 2026 · Última actualización del sitio: June 18, 2026