Essay On Bloodletting

When one is sick with a persistent fever, cough, or even just a small cold the majority of the population would usually go to the doctor. Now that instead of receiving a prescription or a suggestion for lots of fluids, the sick individual receives an incision made in their arm and a bowl by their feet to catch the blood. Although this method of treatment would be seen as ludicrous to current doctors, Hippocratic physicians used bloodletting as a panacea. Bloodletting is the act of purposefully making a sick individual bleed for medical reasons. In ancient Greece, bloodletting was a common practice to remove a pathological humor from a patient's body to restore the balance of their humors and alleviate the illness afflicting the patient (Bockler 107).
The cardinal fluids are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each humor is associated with a different organ and season. Black bile is associated with the spleen and Autumn, yellow bile with the liver and Summer, phlegm with the brain and Winter, and blood with the heart and Spring. In addition, every human possess two primary opposite qualities: hot, dry, moist, or cold. An individual’s temperament can be distinguished by which humor they are. These fluids are meant to have a natural balance that is unique to each person and keeps humans healthy. If the balance is disturbed, illness occurs. Hippocratic physicians believed these balances could be restored by removing or adding humors (Carthledge, 314; Bockler 106).
This particular theory dates back before Greek times, but Hippocrates reworked it into what is now known as the Hippocratic humoral theory. Hippocrates of Cos was a physician who lived between 460-380 BCE. He has multiple textual works accredited to him although there is no evidence he wrote them. These works include the Hippocratic Corpus and the Hippocratic Oath (L. Adkins and R. Adkins