well aim'd at heart or head--
Thieves that, with demon heart and will,
Would fain have on they vials fed.

O, They have blessed thee for thy aid,
When grateful eyes, thy presence, spoke;
Thou, anguish'd bosoms, glad hast made,
And miser's tyrant sceptre broke.

Now, when 'mong strangers, is our sphere,
Thou, to my heart, are but the more
Endear'd--as many a woe-wring tear
Would plainly tell, if from me tore!

There was little change in the mechanism of the spring lancet during the
nineteenth century, despite the efforts of inventors to improve it.
Approximately five American patents on variations of the spring lancet
were granted in the nineteenth century. One patent model survives in the
Smithsonian collection. Joseph Gordon of Catonsville, Maryland, in 1857
received patent No. 16479 for a spring lancet constructed so that three
different positions of the ratchet could be set by the sliding shield. The
position of the ratchet regulated the force with which the blade entered
the vein. This also had the advantage of allowing the blade to enter the
vein at the same angle irrespective of the depth to which it
penetrated.[71]

_The Decline of Bleeding_

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, most
physicians of note, regardless of their explanations of disease, including
Hermann Boerhaave, Gerard Van Swieten, Georg Ernst Stahl (phlogiston),
John Brown and Friedrich Hoffmann (mechanistic theories), Johann Peter
Frank, Albrecht von Haller, Percival Pott, John Pringle, William Cullen,
and Francois Broussais, recommended bloodletting and adjusted their
theories to provide an explanation for its value. At the end of the
eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, the practice of
bloodletting reached a high point with the theories of F.-J.-V. Broussais
(1772-1838) and others. After 1830, however, the practice gradually
declined until, by the end of the century, it had all but disappeared.

This decline occurred even though many medical theories were brought to
the defense of bleeding. A French medical observer commented in 1851 that
"l'histoire de la saignee consideree dans son ensemble, constituerait
presque a elle seule l'histoire de toutes les doctrines medicales" (the
history of bloodletting, considered in its totality, would constitute
almost by itself the history of all medical doctrines).[72] There was no
crisis of medical opinion, and no one event to acc