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Re-imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Robert G.W. Kirk  and
Neil Pemberton
Robert G.W. Kirk
Affiliation:
Robert G.W. Kirk, Wellcome Research Fellow, and Neil Pemberton, Research Fellow, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, The University of Manchester, Simon Building, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Emails: robert.g.kirk@manchester. ac.uk and neil.pemberton@manchester.ac.uk
Neil Pemberton
Affiliation:
Robert G.W. Kirk, Wellcome Research Fellow, and Neil Pemberton, Research Fellow, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, The University of Manchester, Simon Building, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Emails: robert.g.kirk@manchester. ac.uk and neil.pemberton@manchester.ac.uk
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While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine. Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the question: what work can the non-human animal achieve for the history of medicine? We do so in the light of the conceptual possibilities opened up by the rapidly emerging field of ‘animal studies’. This interdisciplinary and sophisticated body of work has, in various ways, revealed the value of the ‘animal’ as a tool for exploring the co-constitution of species identity. We asked ourselves, surely, in our present biomedical world, this must be an area that we as medical historians are best placed to comment on; and what better place to start than the well-known, yet surprisingly little-studied, medical leech?

Keywords

BloodlettingPhlebotomyLeechMedical PracticeFrançois-Joseph-Victor BroussaisLeech CrazeAnimal Studies
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 355 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 W.F. Bynum, ‘“C'est un malade”: Animal Models and Concepts of Human Diseases’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 45 (1990), 397–413.

2 For further elaboration on this point see Robert G.W. Kirk and Michael Worboys, ‘Medicine and Species: One Medicine, One History’, in Mark Jackson, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

3 Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 15, 2 (1985), 65–107, 152.

4 James Rawlins Johnson, A Treatise on the Medicinal Leech: Including its Medical and Natural History, with a Description of its Anatomical Structure; also, Remarks upon the Diseases, Preservation and Management of Leeches (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816).

5 For this and following quotations see Rees Price, A Treatise on the Utility of Sangui-suction or Leech Bleeding: In the Treatment of a great Variety of Diseases (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1822).

6 An exploration of the constitution of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ through categories of moral, economic and humane thinking might best begin with Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Miller, 1759), within which Smith first referred to the ‘invisible hand’ and made sympathy the locus of moral behaviour. This point is owed to Professor Roger Cooter, raised at ‘The Future of Medical History’ conference, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 15–17 July 2010.

7 Robert G. W. Kirk and Neil Pemberton, Leech (London: Reaktion, forthcoming).