ring the previous half century. At the
beginning of his career, he had ignored the request of his patients who
wanted annual bloodlettings to "breathe a vein" to maintain good health.
He eventually found that to give up the practice entirely was as wrong as
to overdo it when severe symptoms of a violent, acute cardiac disease
presented themselves. Lung congestion and dropsy were other common
disorders that seemed to him to be relieved, at least temporarily, by
venesection.[77]

In 1875 the Englishman W. Mitchell Clarke, after reviewing the long
history of bloodletting and commenting on the abrupt cessation of the
practice in his own time, wrote:

Experience must, indeed, as Hippocrates says in his first aphorism,
be fallacious if we decide that a means of treatment, sanctioned by
the use of between two and three thousand years, and upheld by the
authority of the ablest men of past times, is finally and forever
given up. This seems to me to be the most interesting and important
question in connection with this subject. Is the relinquishment of
bleeding final? or shall we see by and by, or will our successors
see, a resumption of the practice? This, I take it, is a very
difficult question to answer; and he would be a very bold man who,
after looking carefully through the history of the past, would
venture to assert that bleeding will not be profitably employed any
more.[78]

An intern, Henri A. Lafleur of the newly founded Johns Hopkins Hospital,
reported on five patients on whom venesection was performed between 1889
and 1891. Lafleur defended his interest in the subject by calling
attention to other recent reports of successes with bleeding, such as that
of Dr. Pye-Smith of London. He concluded that at least temporary relief
from symptoms due to circulatory disorders, especially those involving the
pulmonary system, was achieved through venesection.

Pneumonia and pleurisy were the primary diseases for which venesection was
an approved remedy.[79] It had long been believed by bloodletters that
these complaints were especially amenable to an early and repeated
application of the lancet.[80] Austin Flint had explained in 1867 that
bloodletting "is perhaps more applicable to the treatment of inflammation
affecting the pulmonary organs than to the treatment of other inflammatory
affections, in consequence of the relations of the former [pulmonary
organs] to the