I'd appreciate it if you could help me
Prior to the 19th century, a common method of treating disease was called shaqqeol therapy. Lagotherapy cures diseases by drawing blood out of the body, and is still used in some parts of the world today. The blood was drained mainly by having leeches suck the blood. Why was bloodletting believed to cure diseases?
Until around the 19th century, medicine knew very little about the human body. Of course, it was not known that viruses and bacteria caused many diseases. Due to religious taboos and legal restrictions, dissection of the human body was also not possible. Therefore, even physicians had very limited knowledge of human anatomy until the 17th century. They did not understand how blood flowed through the body to carry oxygen and nutrients, nor did they understand the role of the brain and neural pathways that controlled consciousness, thought, and sensation.
-- Fifty Animals that Changed the Course of History
Galen (c. 129 ~ 200), a famous Greek physician during the Roman Empire, believed that blood has two pathways: arterial blood produced by the heart and venous blood produced by the liver, and that blood stagnates and pools here and there in the body, causing disease. By draining the blood out of the body, he believed, illnesses could be cured.
Although we are not familiar with leeches today, they live in freshwater ponds and waterways and suck the blood of animals such as horses, cows, and humans by sucking on their skin. When they suck blood, they also produce an anticoagulant substance called hirudin to prevent the wound from hardening into a scab. The leech image is irritating, so please look it up only if you want to. LOL, leeches can be used to draw blood during phlebotomy treatment, right? So, phlebotomy with leeches itself had been practiced since B.C., but Galen and his followers made it more widely spread. Phlebotomy with leeches increased during the Middle Ages and reached its zenith in the 17th century.
Blood by leeches was recommended for a variety of conditions, especially blushing, inflammation, and high fever, which were believed to be caused by excess blood in the body, so leech therapy was often used. Hyperaemia, a condition that causes an overly exuberant, energetic, and overly vivacious state of mind, was also treated with high blood. Oddly enough, leeches were also used to treat trauma. Patients who were already weak from blood loss were subjected to intermittent high blood pressure, which caused severe weakness and even death. Bloodletting was also used to prevent childbirth, and was a common practice during childbirth and surgery.
-- Fifty Animals that Changed the Course of History
Doctors were not the only ones who used leeches. In England, barbers were also allowed to perform surgical and dental procedures, so they performed phlebotomy and surgery on the poor and wounded soldiers on the battlefield who could not afford to see a doctor.
It is a well-known misconception that the sign pole standing in front of the barbershop represents the phlebotomy and surgical operations that were once performed by barbers. The red color of the pole represents blood, the white color represents a tourniquet for the arm, and the entire pole is said to represent a wooden stick held by the patient to widen the veins and make it easier to draw blood. Leeches have almost disappeared in many parts of Europe due to overhunting for their use in phlebotomy. Doctors and barbers had to bring in leeches from distant areas or catch them and breed them themselves. It is said that Mozart's death was hastened by the doctor's use of phlebotomy when he was originally in poor health. Also, although the image is an image, it is said that he kept leeches by filling water in a jar like this.
In modern times, in the 1620s, developments in scientific medicine revealed the mechanism of blood circulation by the heart, and Galen's "two fluid theory" was held to be false. However, the treatment of blood in the gulf by leeches continued until the end of the 19th century. Also in the 1980s, medical leeches were used in surgery. As mentioned earlier, leech saliva contains hirudin, a powerful anticoagulant, so during transplant surgery, leeches were placed on the site of the transplant to prevent clotting of the bloodstream. Nowadays, "synthetic hirudin" made by humans is used.
