Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [58]
“How do you get them to bite where you want them to?” I asked.
“In the old days, they used a quill or some other hollow tube. They’d place the leech into the tube then hold it against the spot where they wanted it to bite.”
I also learned that barber-surgeons or other “leechers” would place several Hirudo into a teacup, invert the cup, and hold it in place on their patient until the leeches got the message and latched on.
“In modern times, though, they’ll just cut a small hole in a sterile gauze pad, place the hole over the designated spot, then stick the leech’s head near the hole. The gauze keeps the leech from wandering off, but you’ve still got to keep an eye on them.”
“Do they ever turn down a meal?” I asked.
“Oh, they can be very picky,” Rudy said with a laugh. “Leeches hate perfumed soaps or smelly hair sprays. Often, they won’t attach if the person is a heavy smoker or if they’ve eaten garlic recently.”
I must have looked confused.
“The patient, that is.”
“Got it,” I said. “So how do you deal with a leech who plays ‘hard to bite’?”
“Most of the time if you clean and shave the potential attachment site, then sprinkle on a couple of drops of blood, sugared water, or even milk—you can whet their appetite.”
“And what if that doesn’t work?”
“You can try abrading the skin a bit. Other times you can get leeches in the mood by immersing them briefly in diluted wine or warm, dark beer. And if they still won’t bite, we just tell the physician to grab another leech.”*82
“What happens to the leech after a treatment?”
Rudy frowned at this one. “Well, unfortunately, the treatment turns out to be their last meal,” he replied. “Scientists have figured out that some human blood cells remain alive within a medicinal leech for up to six months.” Evidently, they’re still trying to figure out how this works but it appears to have something to do with the Aeromonas bacteria releasing chemicals that kill off other bacteria that might be present. Bacteria that would have presumably contributed to the destruction of the blood had they been alive and active.
“Anyway, blood-borne diseases can be transmitted if leeches get reapplied to someone else—so the bottom line is that once they feed, leeches are treated as medical waste.”
“And how do you dispose of them?”
“Submerse them in alcohol, generally,” Rudy said, then he looked at me over the top of his glasses again. “But you never want to flush them down the toilet.”
I immediately took the bait. “Why’s that?”
“Well, one day I got a call from a hospital. For some reason they’d decided to get rid of their leeches—so they flushed them.”
“And?”
I noticed that the leech maven could barely contain his glee.
“Well, apparently the leeches loved the idea. They’re escape artists to begin with—and pretty soon they started showing up in toilets all over the hospital. The hospital people were kind of frantic by the time they called me.”
“What did you tell them?” I was already envisioning some truly unique target practice opportunities.
Rudy threw up his hands. “I told them to get a net.”
In the late nineteenth century, medical advances began to overshadow ancient techniques like bloodletting and leeching. Physicians shifted their focus from humeral imbalances to bacteria as the causative agents for diseases and infections. A few daring researchers even claimed that bleeding a patient might do them more harm than good. Not surprisingly, the medical community showed some initial resistance to revamping, so to speak, what had been a longstanding therapeutic procedure. Some of these physicians apparently had more of a problem abandoning the idea of bleeding patients than others, going so far as to claim that industrialization or even changes in the earth’s magnetic field had led to the recent ineffectiveness of bloodletting.
By the 1930s the need for Hirudo husbandry dropped off considerably—and it pretty much stayed that way until the mid-1970s. In New York City and Boston,