I conclude this chapter with a couple of sentences taken from Dr. Phillips’s ‘Materia Medica’ on the present use of leeches:—
The special value of leeching is shown in the early stage of local congestion and inflammations: such as arise from injuries, and in orchitis, laryngitis, haemorrhoids, and inflammations of the ear and eye, cerebral congestions, and congestive fixed headache.
Leeches are also of service, in a manner less easy to understand, in inflammations of deep-seated parts without direct vascular connexion with the surface—for example, in hepatitis, pleuritis, and pericarditis, as well as in pneumonia, peritonitis, and, according to some observers, in meningitis. In all these disorders, however, they are very much less used than formerly—in the larger hospitals, for instance, when at one time they cost many hundred pounds annually, a few dozens in the year would represent the total employed.[17]
CHAPTER XII
LEECHES
Part III
EXOTIC LEECHES
(Limnatis nilotica and Haemadipsa zeylanica).
Rulers that neither see nor feel nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.