Bloodletting Instruments in the National Museum of History and Technology

Excerpt

Introduction

Bloodletting, the removal of blood from the body, has been practiced in some form by almost all societies and cultures. At various times, bloodletting was considered part of the medical treatment for nearly every ailment known to man. It was also performed as punishment or as a form of worship to a Superior Power or Being. It still retains therapeutic value today, although only for an extremely limited range of conditions. In early attempts to extract blood from the body, the skin was penetrated in various places with a sharp instrument made of stone, wood, metal, bristle, or any other rigid material. When it was recognized that a vein visible on the surface of the skin as a blue-green stripe contained blood, the vein was incised directly. To facilitate “breathing a vein” and to provide greater safety, more refined and sharper instruments were devised. As theories supporting bloodletting grew more complex, so too did the instruments.

Spontaneous forms of bleeding, including nosebleed, menstruation, and those instances produced by a blow to any part of the body, apparently inspired the earliest human bloodletters. The Egyptians claimed that the hippopotamus rubbed its leg against a sharp reed until it bled to remove excess blood from its body. The Peruvians noted that a bat would take blood from the toe of a sleeping person when the opportunity presented itself. A deer, and goat, would pick a place near its diseased eye for relief. The methods employed by animals increased interest in using artificial methods for letting blood in man.

The devices man has employed to remove blood from the body fall into two major categories: (1) those instruments used for general bloodletting, that is, the opening of an artery, or more commonly a vein, and (2) those instruments used in local bloodletting. Instruments in the first category include lancets, spring lancets, fleams, and phlebotomes. Associated with these are the containers to collect and measure the blood spurting from the patient. In the second category are those instruments associated with leeching and cupping. In both of these methods of local bloodletting, only the capillaries are severed and the blood is drawn from the body by some means of suction, either by a leech or by an air exhausted vessel. Instruments in this category include scarificators, cupping glasses, cupping devices, and many artificial leeches invented to replace the living leech.

Much effort and ingenuity was expanded, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to improve the techniques of bloodletting. In the eighteenth century, delicate mechanical spring lancets and scarificators were invented to replace the simpler thumb lancets and fleams. In the nineteenth century, as surgical supply companies began to advertise and market their wares, many enterprising inventors turned their hand to developing new designs for lancets and scarificators, pumps, fancy cupping sets, rubber cups, and all manner of cupping devices and artificial leeches....