ount for this decline.
The French physician, Pierre Louis's statistical investigation (numerical
method) into the effect of bloodletting in the treatment of pneumonia has
often been cited as a cause for the downfall of venesection,[73] but the
results of Louis's research showed only that bloodletting was not as
useful as was previously thought. Louis's work, however, was typical of a
new and critical attitude in the nineteenth century towards all
traditional remedies. A number of investigators in France, Austria,
England, and America did clinical studies comparing the recovery rates of
those who were bled and those who were not.[74] Other physicians attempted
to measure, by new instruments and techniques, the physiological affects
of loss of blood. Once pathological anatomy had associated disease
entities with specific lesions, physicians sought to discover exactly how
remedies such as bloodletting would affect these lesions. In the case of
pneumonia, for example, those who defined the disease as "an exudation
into the vessels and tissues of the lungs" could not see how bloodletting
could remove the coagulation. John Hughes Bennett, an Edinburgh physician,
wrote in 1855: "It is doubtful whether a large bleeding from the arm can
operate upon the stagnant blood in the pulmonary capillaries--that it can
directly affect the coagulated exudation is impossible."[75] Bennett felt
that bloodletting merely reduced the strength of the patient and thus
impeded recovery.

Bloodletting was attacked not only by medical investigators, but much more
vehemently by members of such medical sects as the homeopaths and botanics
who sought to replace the harsh remedies of the regular physicians by
their own milder systems of therapeutics.[76]

As a result of all this criticism the indications for bleeding were
gradually narrowed, until at the present time bloodletting is used in only
a few very specific important instances.

In England and America, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a
last serious attempt was made to revive bloodletting before it died out
altogether. A number of Americans defended the limited use of bleeding,
especially in the form of venesection. The noted American physician, Henry
I. Bowditch, tried in 1872 to arouse support for venesection among his
Massachusetts Medical Society colleagues. He noted that venesection
declined more than any other medical opinion in the esteem of the
physician and the public du