CHAPTER XII.
BLEEDING.
Fashion, capricious everywhere, is especially so in surgery and medicine. Smoking we are now taught to regard as a pernicious practice, to be abhorred as James the First abhorred it. Yet Dr. Archer, and Dr. Everard in his "Panacea, or a Universal Medicine, being a discovery of the wonderful virtues of Tobacco" (1659), warmly defended the habit, and for long it was held by the highest authorities to be an efficacious preservative against disease. What would schoolboys now say to being flogged for not smoking? Yet Thomas Hearne, in his diary (1720-21) writes—"Jan. 21, I have been told that in the last great plague in London none that kept tobacconists' shops had the plague. It is certain that smoking was looked upon as a most excellent preservative. In so much, that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say, that when he was that year, when the plague raged, a school-boy at Eton, all the boys of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoaking."
Blood-letting, so long a popular remedy with physicians, has, like tobacco-smoking for medicinal purposes, fallen into disuse and contempt. From Hippocrates to Paracelsus, who, with characteristic daring, raised some objections to the practice of venesection, doctors were in the habit of drawing disease from the body as vintners extract claret from a cask, in a ruddy stream. In the feudal ages bleeding was in high favour. Most of the abbeys had a "flebotomaria" or "bleeding-house," in which the sacred inmates underwent bleedings (or "minutions" as they were termed) at stated periods of the year, to the strains of psalmody. The brethren of the order of St. Victor underwent five munitions annually—in September, before Advent, before Lent, after Easter, and at Pentecost.
There is a good general view of the superstitions and customs connected with venesection, in "The Salerne Schoole," a poem of which mention continually occurs in the writings of our old physicians. The poem commences with the following stanza:—
"The 'Salerne Schoole' doth by these lines impart
All health to England's king, and doth advise
From care his head to keepe, from wrath his hart.
Drink not much wine, sup light and soon arise,
When meat is gone long sitting breedeth smart;
And afternoon still waking keep your eies.
. . . . .
Use three physicians still—first Doctor Quiet,
Next Doctor Merriman and Doctor Dyet.
"Of bleeding many profits grow and great
The spirits and sences are renew'd thereby,
Thogh these mend slowly by the strength of meate,
But these with wine restor'd are by-and-by;
By bleeding to the marrow commeth heate,
It maketh cleane your braine, releeves your eie,
It mends your appetite, restoreth sleepe,
Correcting humors that do waking keep:
All inward parts and sences also clearing,
It mends the voice, touch, smell, and taste, and hearing.
"Three special months, September, Aprill, May,
There are in which 'tis good to ope a vein—
In these three months the moon beares greatest sway,
Then old or young, that store of blood containe,
May bleed now, though some elder wizards say,
Some daies are ill in these, I hold it vaine;
September, Aprill, May have daies apeece,
That bleeding do forbid and eating geese,
And those are they, forsooth, of May the first,
Of t'other two, the last of each are worst.