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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bloodletting | 4/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:17:33.324303+00:00 | kb-cron |
Bloodletting is not self-administered. Out of 14 cultures in which the bloodletting practitioner was mentioned, the practitioner was always a third party. 13 out of 14 of the cultures had practitioners with roles related to medicine, while one culture had a practitioner whose role was not related to medicine. The idea of bloodletting removing "bad blood" that needs to be taken out was common, and was explicitly mentioned in 10 out of 14 cultures studied with detailed descriptions of bloodletting. Bloodletting is not thought to be effective against illness caused supernaturally by humans (e.g., witchcraft). This is surprising, because in most cultures witchcraft and sorcery can be blamed for ailments. But out of 14 cultures with detailed bloodletting descriptions, there was no evidence of bloodletting being used to cure witchcraft-related ailments, while bloodletting was recorded as a cure for ailments of other origins. The Azande culture has been recorded to believe that bloodletting does not work to cure human-related witchcraft ailments. Bloodletting is usually administered directly to the affected area, e.g. if the patient has a headache, a cut is made on the forehead. Out of 14 cultures with information on the localization of bloodletting, 11 at least sometimes removed blood from the affected area, while 3 specifically removed blood from a different area from the area in pain. Europe is the only continent with more instances of non-colocalized than colocalized bloodletting. In a transmission chain experiment done on people living in the US through Amazon Mechanical Turk, stories about bloodletting in a non-affected area were much more likely to transition into stories about bloodletting being administered near the area in pain than vice versa. This suggests that colocalized bloodletting could be a cultural attractor and is more likely to be culturally transmitted, even among people in the US who are likely more familiar with non-colocalized bloodletting. Bloodletting as a concept is thought to be a cultural attractor, or an intrinsically attractive / culturally transmissible concept. This could explain bloodletting's independent cross-cultural emergence and common cross-cultural traits.
== See also ==
== References ==
== Books cited == Carter, K. Codell; Barbara R. Carter (2005). Childbed fever. A scientific biography of Ignaz Semmelweis. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-0467-7. Carter, K. Codell (2012). The Decline of Therapeutic Bloodletting and the Collapse of Traditional Medicine. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4604-2. Kang, Lydia; Nate Pederson (2017). Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. Workman Publishing Company.
== Further reading == McGrew, Roderick. Encyclopedia of Medical History (1985), brief history pp. 32–34
== External links ==
The History and Progression of Bloodletting Medical Antiques: Scarification and Bleeding Pictures of antique bloodletting instruments PBS's Red Gold: The Story of Blood Archived 22 July 2015 at the Wayback Machine Huge collection of antique bloodletting instruments "Breathing a Vein" phisick.com 14 Nov 2011