BAD MEDICINE

Bloodletting

Listen, friend, we’re starting to feel really close to you after the past hundred-and-some pages, so we’re just going to come right out and say it: We think you’re getting a little bit full. Listen to yourself: you’re just kinda . . . sloshing around. Haven’t you put it off enough? Isn’t it time to get some of that blood out of there?

Oh sure, you could donate it—like a sucker—but the important thing is that we get that excess blood out of there and get you on the road to recovery.

For almost as long as we’ve been trying to fix people, we’ve been doing—there’s no nice way to say it—just about the most unintuitive thing conceivable: bloodletting, the practice of draining some of a patient’s perfectly fine blood in the hopes that it’ll fix what’s ailing them.

Maybe even more shocking than the practice itself (well, equally shocking at least; bloodletting is wicked stupid) is how many things we’ve prescribed bloodletting for.

Seizures

In the late 1600s, English king Charles II suffered a seizure, but luckily his crack team of physicians knew exactly what to do: drain him like a Capri-Sun. They took sixteen ounces from Charles II, followed up with a bracing round of enemas. Chuck 2 had more seizures, which is weird because of all the blood they took, but luckily they had one last Hail Mary in the playbook: taking a bunch more blood. By the time he had died (from extremely related causes), they had drained him of twenty four ounces; that’s two Diet Coke cans of blood. (Sorry for making any vampires out there super thirsty.)

Fevers

Did you know leeches can drink ten times their own weight in blood? Well, early 19th century French physician Francois Broussais sure did! He believed any fever in your body could be fixed by tossing a leech on it and letting it remove the excess organ inflammation. That . . . isn’t right. You knew that wasn’t right, right? Right.

That didn’t stop the Parisians, of course. By the 1830s, five to six million leeches a year were used in the city alone, with another thirty million leeching blood across the country per annum. Passion for the practice had waned by the end of the century, so if you wonder why you always see so many leeches panhandling in Paris, now you know.

Yellow Fever

Benjamin Rush was an unorthodox, if formative, physician in the late 1700s and early 1800s. (He signed the Declaration of Independence. He gave Lewis and Clark mercury pills to help them poop. He was a big deal.) He also shared some of Broussais’ unconventional ideas about fever. In 1815, he went to bat for them, specifically with regards to yellow fever. He wrote:

“I have attempted to prove that the higher grades of fever depend upon morbid and excessive action in the blood-vessels. It is connected of course, with preternatural sensibility in their muscular fibres. The blood is the most powerful irritant which acts upon them. By abstracting a part of it, we lessen the principal cause of the fever. The effect of blood-letting is as immediate and natural in removing fever, as the abstraction of a particle of sand is, to cure inflammation of the eye, when it arises from that cause. [Bloodletting] imparts strength to the body, by removing the depression which is induced by the remote cause of the fever.”

Yup, that’s right, the blood was the problem the whole time.

Assassination

Okay, admittedly this one is a bit of a stretch. When George Washington took ill after a snowy ride in 1799, his doctors recommended bloodletting. That wasn’t that weird at the end of the 18th century, but what was slightly more unorthodox was how much they drained . . . eighty ounces. That’s just under half of his blood. You can’t live without half your blood, and America’s first president was no exception.

We’re not saying it was intentional, but it’s hard to argue that doctors didn’t technically assassinate Washington. Is this already the plot of an Assassin’s Creed game? If not, we call dibs on it.