The manuals also told them how to limit the bleeding when they were finished. There were also instructions about how to avoid nerves and arteries near the site of the incision. There were detailed instruction books available to physicians telling them how to tie the arm to prepare the vein and how to make the cut. If the diagnosis was that the patient was melancholic, however, a vein in the forehead was more likely to be cut. The veins in the thumb were associated with pains in the head and the vein between the ankle and the foot was linked to diseases of the genitals. The most common place for bloodletting was the arm, in which there were three major veins: the cephalic, the median and the basilic. All the four humours were present in blood, so an excess of one of them could be removed by drawing off some blood. The main purpose of bloodletting was to treat diseases by restoring balance between the humours. You’ll note that this required him to do a bit more than just look at the blood. He was to look for viscosity, hotness or coldness, greasiness, taste, foaminess and speed of coagulation. The physician was to examine it before, during and after coagulation.

An instruction book, probably written by Maurus of Salerno in the twelfth century, told the physician what to look for in the blood he collected from his patient.

One of the purposes of bloodletting was to allow the physician to make a diagnosis. Bloodletting was carried out by both surgeons and physicians, even though it was technically a surgical procedure. As medical texts from the Greek and Arabic-speaking worlds were translated into Latin from the twelfth century onwards, it became even more important as one of the physician’s many skills. E ven in the early Middle Ages it was far from unusual.īloodletting is a logical consequence of accepting that illness is caused by an imbalance of the humours. For some reason I had assumed that bloodletting wasn’t very common in the Middle Ages, but my current reading about medieval medicine has set me right.

Hartnell medieval bodies