Why did they bleed patients?

Jar to keep leeches in at the Old Operating Theatre Museum, Southwark

Many reviews of my novel mention how readers were fascinated by the descriptions of medicine 200 years ago. There are quite a few scenes with leeches or lancets. Some reviewers even said they’d gone to look up why practitioners bled patients. Bleeding has been practised for thousands of years. According to Galen, physician in Ancient Greece, it balanced the four humours which were black bike, yellow bike, phlegm and blood.

 Could it have worked? Only if you had haemochromatosis, a condition of iron overload which bleeding would improve. Many women were already anaemic from a poor diet, heavy periods and pregnancy, and bleeding would make this worse. Possibly it may have had a placebo effect.

 In Keats’s time they were collected by people wading into water, letting leeches attach themselves to their legs, then removing them. Wordsworth wrote a poem about a leech gatherer, called Resolution and Independence.

 Bleeding as a general treatment stopped in the late 1800s due to advances in understanding of disease and new treatments, although  leeches are still used today in microsurgery as an anticoagulant to relieve congestion post operation. There is also an anaesthetic in leech saliva. Apparently leech bites aren’t painful but I’ve not tried them!