“Send her to me,” said the czar.
The woman was brought, but persisted in affirming that her teeth were sound, and never ached. The valet alleged that this was always the way she did when the physician was called; therefore, in spite of her cries and remonstrances, the king ordered her husband to hold her head between his knees, when the czar drew out his instruments and instantly extracted the tooth designated by the husband, disregarding the cries of the unfortunate victim.
In a few days the czar was informed that the thing was a put-up job by the jealous husband, in order to punish, if not mar the beauty of, his gallant wife, whereupon the instruments were again brought into requisition; and this time the naughty valet was the sufferer, to the extent of losing a sound and valuable tooth.
Every Tinker has his Day.
During a long period, and in several countries, the barbers were the only acknowledged blood-letters. Some of them were educated to the trade of bleeding. Dr. Meade was once lecturer to the barber-surgeons, and, if I mistake not, Dr. Abernethy; but the majority of them were as ignorant as the tinkers, who also went about the country bleeding the people at both vein and pocket.
In 1592 one Nicolas Gyer published a work entitled “The English Phlebotomy, or Method of Healing by Letting of Blood.” Its motto was, “The horse-leech hath two daughters, which crye, ‘Give, give.’” The author thus complains: “Phlebotomy is greatly abused by vagabond horse-leeches and travelling tinkers, who find work in almost every village, who have, in truth, neither knowledge, wit, or honesty; hence the sober practitioner and cunning chirurgeon liveth basely, is despised, and counted a very abject amongst the vulgar sort.”
Many of the abbeys of Europe and Asia had a “phlebotomaria,” or bleeding-room, connected, in which the sacred (?) inmates underwent bleeding at certain seasons. The monks of the order of St. Victor, and others, underwent five venesections per year; for the “Salerne Schoole,” 1601, says,—
“To bleed doth cheare the pensive, and remove
The raging furies fed by burning love.”
The priests seem to have overlooked Paul’s advice, for such to marry, as it was “better to marry than to burn.” If the writer could unfold the secrets of his “prison-house,”—as doubtless is the experience of most physicians,—he could tell of worse habits of some modern priests than this quinarial venesection.
“To bleed in May is still the custom with ignorant people in a few remote districts” of England. In Marchland a woman used to bleed patients for a few pence per arm.