Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [34]
Rather than condemning Washington’s attending physicians, these nineteenth-century armchair quarterbacks have actually exonerated them, for it is unlikely that anyone could have saved him using the medical practices of the day. What might be even more difficult to accept is that even if George Washington had lived a century later—in all likelihood his treatment and its outcome (in the absence of antibiotics) would have been exactly the same (the only difference being that his physicians probably would have used leeches to draw off his blood).
But why was this so? With tremendous advances in nearly every field of science, why were renowned physicians still bleeding their patients, often to fatal excess, right into the twentieth century? How did this practice of bloodletting come about? Does it ever work and if not, then why are thousands of leeches being used by physicians today around the world?
To answer these questions, we’ll need to take a slight detour from blood-feeding creatures to examine our knowledge (or until recently, our lack of knowledge) concerning blood and the circulatory system.
As opposed to our longstanding misconceptions about bats, bad information on blood and the circulatory system didn’t start with the Europeans—although they were responsible for carrying this miserable banner for well over a thousand years.
The ancient Egyptians certainly had some vague ideas about the function of the circulatory system (as revealed in the Smith and Ebers papyri, dated to the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE, respectively). They knew, for example, that there was a relationship between the heart and a person’s pulse. Their knowledge was somewhat limited, however, by an inability to differentiate among blood vessels, nerves, tendons, and ureters (the tubes which carry urine from the kidneys to the urinary bladder). This led to confusion about substances like sperm, urine, tears, and blood, although the latter was put to some use. For example, some ancient Egyptians took the blood of a black calf or a black ox, mixed it with oil, then slathered it on top of their heads. Why? To combat graying hair, of course—a sort of Grecian Formula 44 before there were actual Greeks. Maybe that sounds ridiculous today, but the implication is that there was something in the blood itself that would restore blackness to the hair.
The word blood shows up in the Bible over four hundred times with the earliest mention coming in the Old Testament (Genesis 4:10), right after Cain has murdered his brother, Abel: “And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.’” Later, an even more significant passage concerning blood occurs in Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”
Since the ancient Hebrews believed that the spirit resided in the blood, killing someone was more often referred to as spilling or shedding their blood. It was and is, arguably, the most serious thing we can do to another human. So serious, it seems, that it calls for the spilling of more blood from those deemed responsible.
Blood pops up (oozes up?) again in the Old Testament, in Genesis 9:3–4, as God is chatting with Noah: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I give you the green plants, I give you everything. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” (Note: This passage follows right after God’s more popular command that Noah and his sons “be fruitful and multiply.” )
This notion, that life itself resided in the blood, appears to have led to the requirement