Q&A Your history questions answered
Bloodletting dates back thousands of years to the Egyptians. It gained widespread popularity through the writings of the Greek physician Galen, who practised medicine in Rome during the second century AD. He believed that humans carried four bodily humours inside them: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. When these four humours became imbalanced, a person became ill. Health could be restored through purging, starving, vomiting, or bloodletting – all of which would help rid the body of the superfluous or corrupt humours.
While bloodletting may seem barbaric to modern eyes, it was considered a standard part of medical treatment for centuries, demanded by patients themselves. Take George Washington, who woke on the morning of 14 December 1799 complaining that he couldn’t breathe. Fearing his doctor would not arrive in time, Washington asked for the overseer of his slaves to step in and bleed him. The cut was deep, and Washington lost nearly half a pint before the wound was closed. When the physicians eventually arrived, they proceeded to bleed Washington four more times over the next eight hours. By evening, America’s first president was dead. One of his physicians, James Craik, later admitted that he thought the blood loss was partly responsible for Washington’s demise. But why did bloodletting remain so popular for so long given the dangers it posed? Despite advances in anatomy and diagnostics during the 18th and 19th centuries, therapeutics did not evolve quickly enough to match new understandings of the body. Many medical practitioners believed it was better to do something than to do nothing at all.