d to remove
excess blood from its body.[1] The Peruvians noted that a bat would take
blood from the toe of a sleeping person when the opportunity presented
itself. A deer, and goat, would pick a place near its diseased eye for
relief.[2] The methods employed by animals increased interest in using
artificial methods for letting blood in man.

The devices man has employed to remove blood from the body fall into two
major categories: (1) those instruments used for general bloodletting,
that is, the opening of an artery, or more commonly a vein, and (2) those
instruments used in local bloodletting. Instruments in the first category
include lancets, spring lancets, fleams, and phlebotomes. Associated with
these are the containers to collect and measure the blood spurting from
the patient. In the second category are those instruments associated with
leeching and cupping. In both of these methods of local bloodletting, only
the capillaries are severed and the blood is drawn from the body by some
means of suction, either by a leech or by an air exhausted vessel.
Instruments in this category include scarificators, cupping glasses,
cupping devices, and many artificial leeches invented to replace the
living leech.

Much effort and ingenuity was expanded, especially in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, to improve the techniques of bloodletting. In the
eighteenth century, delicate mechanical spring lancets and scarificators
were invented to replace the simpler thumb lancets and fleams. In the
nineteenth century, as surgical supply companies began to advertise and
market their wares, many enterprising inventors turned their hand to
developing new designs for lancets and scarificators, pumps, fancy cupping
sets, rubber cups, and all manner of cupping devices and artificial
leeches. If we also consider treatments related to bloodletting, in which
blood is transferred from one part of the body to another, without actual
removal from the body, then we can add the many inventions devoted to dry
cupping, irritating the body, and exhausting the air around limbs or even
the entire body. Although many physicians continued to use the traditional
instruments that had been used for centuries, many others turned eagerly
to the latest gadget on the market.

Bloodletting instruments, perhaps the most common type of surgical
instrument little more than a century ago, are now unfamiliar to the
average person. When one sees them for the first