9. In a similar manner to the introduction of bile, a medical belief in the four “humors” resulted in physicians deliberately draining the blood of patients in order to supposedly re-balance the ratios of bodily fluids.
Bloodletting is the deliberate release of blood from a patient in an effort to treat a medical condition. Believed to be the most common practice performed by surgeons throughout history, beginning at the earliest emergence of medicine, bloodletting maintained this prominence until the 19th century over 2,000 years later. Performed for the alleged purpose of balancing the humors, an imbalance of these fluids was generally thought to serve as the primary cause of disease and disability. Hippocrates proposed female menstruation was caused by natural bodily efforts to “purge women of bad humors”, whilst Galen furthered such thought into active balancing through bloodletting.
Consequently, bloodletting was used to treat almost any and every disease or medical condition of the day and achieved either through the stereotypical, but nonetheless historically accurate use of leeches or via cutting. By the medieval period, bloodletting had become entrenched within medical opinion with “bleeding sites” identified for the most suitable penetrative regions of the body. In fact, George Washington, after contracting his ultimately fatal throat infection in 1799, was bled in a healing attempt, with an estimated 3.75 liters of blood removed from the former president across a ten-hour period hastening his death considerably, if not actually causing it.