Blood Letting

Blood Letting

Phlebotomy: is the ancient art of drawing blood from the Human Body, a practice that has been performed in medicine in some form for over 3000 years.
Blood letting was a practice is believed to have originated in Ancient Egyptian Civilizations, and letter spread to the Greeks and Romans, but it is also thought that the Mayan civilization also practiced some form of blood letting.

The Greek method of blood letting was based primarily on the later discredited practice of Humorism, which was a system of medicine adopted by the Greeks, Romans and was practiced perhaps most notably by Hippocrates, the Humoral theory of medicine is based on the Human body compromising Four Basic substances, called humors which when in balance results in a healthy human, the four humors are “Blood” “Yellow Bile” “Black Bile” and “Phlegm” it was believed that each of these humors would decrease and increase based on a variety of factors such as diet and activity as well as things such as season.

Galen a Greek surgeon and philosopher of the Second Century and he was heavily influenced by the work of Hippocrates and the humorism theory, which he brought to the Roman world, his work in blood letting while practicing humorism contributed in his discovery that venous blood and arterial blood have distinct differences he made significant contributions to how the Generations after him would understand the circulatory system, in a time where it was thought that blood was produced and originated in the liver, he discussed and prophesized that arterial blood originated from the Heart.

In the second millennium the humoral system had largely fallen out of use, however Blood Letting remained a constant and was performed by both surgeons and barber surgeons, barber surgeons were one of the most common medical practitioners in the medieval times during this time blood letting was performed not by surgeons of physicians but by barber surgeons who were often denoted by the red and white...

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