Bloodletting and Leeches

The Morbid Curiosity Podcast

Hallie Lloyd

Cryptid, Serialkiller, Science, Disease, Medicine, Scary, Skeleton, Historyofmedicine, Social Sciences, Ghost, History, Medical, Anthropology, Monsters, Archeology, Murder, Creepy, Skeptic, Paranormal, Prison

4.8 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bloodletting is an ancient treatment that persisted until the 18th century. One of the techniques used to let blood were leeches, blood-sucking worms. In this episode, we discuss both the history of bloodletting and these fascinating yet creepy creatures.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode was suggested by Tori on Facebook and my husband, David.
0:05.5	If you'd like to make a suggestion, you can do so on Facebook and Instagram at Morbid Curiosity Podcast,
0:12.4	on Twitter, at Morbid Podcast, and on our website, www.morbid Curiosity Podcast.com.
0:21.0	In this episode, we'll be going into detail on medicinal bloodletting, the feeding process of leeches and their medical use, which can get quite graphic.
0:30.3	So if that's not something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip.
0:46.5	... a good episode to skip. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved.
0:53.8	Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity,
0:58.9	and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.
1:02.4	I am one of those people.
1:04.8	My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity podcast.
1:38.3	Thank you. This is the Morbid Curiosity podcast. How often in a period film or television show has a doctor prescribed bloodletting, or a course of leeches, to an unwell character? I can think of two examples almost immediately.
1:41.3	The 1995 film Sense and Sensibility set in Regency era England,
1:47.0	and the first episode of Blackadder the second, set in the Elizabethan era in England.
1:53.0	While the Blackadder scene pokes fun at physicians of the past for prescribing bloodletting by leeches for every single ailment, the scene in sense and
2:02.2	sensibility is more upsetting, as the modern audience knows the character is very sick and wonders
2:08.2	how bleeding is supposed to help. Bloodletting seems barbaric to us today, not only barbaric, but
2:15.3	illogical. We can't see how the people of the past believed it to be useful, healthy, or revitalizing.
2:22.3	To us, it's debilitating, even deadly.
2:25.3	Our views are based on modern science, which has proven that blood loss is quite detrimental to human health.
2:32.3	It must have been obvious to people of the past that blood
2:35.7	was essential to life. They hunted, they spilled animal blood, and saw that large wounds result
2:41.9	in blood loss and death. Therefore, we'd expect they would want to retain blood rather than drain it.
	...

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