Bloodletting As Symbolism

Victorian doctors practiced what has come to be known as “heroic medicine,” which refers to extremely aggressive and often ineffective treatment methods popular at the time. These include things like amputations, bloodletting, and sweating. Although these treatments could be extremely painful and difficult to recover from, they were the only options at the time and were very rarely effective. The impression I got from many of these treatments was that they provided more of a symbolic comfort from a condition, rather than an actual treatment of the condition. This is the case especially in bloodletting, as performed in the Galenic tradition of the four humours.

It is easy to see the symbolism in many of the Victorian treatments from a historical perspective, but I am sure that at the time, the doctors believed they were making a difference, and the patient believed they were getting better. The very idea of the four humours, which has existed in societies dating back to the ancient Greek, seems to have symbolic, rather than practical, application. 19th century bloodletting followed the Galenic tradition and, assuming fever was caused by too much blood in the system, called for methods of “cupping” and bleeding to drain off some of the excess blood. This act seems to me more of a symbolic act of letting out the sickness through a break in the skin, than an actual cure. It is similar, in my mind, to the ancient act of trepanning, where a hole would be drilled in the skull of a patient in order to let the demons out of their mind.

Last semester, I took an English class called Crime and Horror in the Victorian Era, and the professor described “horror” as the sensation that one gets when one realizes that the boundary of the skin is breakable. “Horror” is the goosebumps that you get on your skin when you see a graphic or bloody image of a mutilated corpse, or when you look at your arm and realize you’ve been cut and see blood there. This fascination with horror, according to my professor, was reflected in the literature of the time, and, I would argue, the medical treatment of bloodletting as well.