t maker, John Weiss. By the
1840s John Weiss, Charriere of Paris, and a few other instrument makers
had begun to form surgical supply companies that attempted to market
instruments over a wide area. While there are a handful of company trade
catalogs dating from the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, the great influx of such
catalogs came after 1870. Trade catalogs, a major source of information on
the new instruments of the nineteenth century, provide the historian with
line drawings, short descriptions indicating the mechanism and the
material of which the instrument was composed, prices, and patent status.
For more details on nineteenth-century instruments one must turn to
brochures and articles in medical journals introducing the instruments to
the medical profession. These sources provide the most detailed
descriptions of how the instruments were constructed, how they were used,
and why they were invented. For many American instruments, the
descriptions available at the U.S. Patent Office offer illustrations of
the mechanism and a discussion of why the instrument was considered novel.
One finds specifications for many bizarre instruments that never appear in
trade catalogs and may never have been actually sold.

A final source of information is the instruments themselves. Some are
engraved with the name of the manufacturer, and a few are even engraved
with the date of manufacture. Some have been taken apart to study the
spring mechanisms and others examined in the Conservation Analytical
Laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution to determine their material
content. The documentation accompanying the instruments, while sometimes
in error, may serve to identify the individual artifact by name, place and
date of manufacture, and to augment our knowledge of the historical
setting in which these instruments were used.

Bleeding: The History

The history of bloodletting has been marked by controversy. The extensive
literature on bloodletting contains numerous polemical treatises that both
extol and condemn the practice. Bloodletting was no sooner criticized as
ineffective and dangerous than it was rescued from complete abandonment by
a new group of zealous supporters.

From the time of Hippocrates (5th century B.C.)--and probably before,
although no written record is available--bloodletting had its vocal
advocates and heated opponents. In the 5th century B.C. Aegimious of Eris
(470 B.C.), author of the first treatise on