Bloodletting Instruments in the National Museum of History and Technology

For over two thousand years, nearly every serious illness began with the same prescription: bloodletting. Doctors believed the body contained four humors, and excess blood was the cause of everything from fever to madness. The cure was simple: open a vein. This book catalogs the extraordinary instruments that made this possible, drawn from the Smithsonian's collection. Here are the lancets concealed in elegant cases, the brass cupping devices with flames and glass bells, the mechanical scarificators with their multiple blades, and the leech jars that traveled to sickbeds across three continents. Davis traces these tools from ancient Greece through Victorian England, showing how the same basic act was performed with radically different technologies across centuries. What emerges is not simply a catalog of curiosities, but a window into a complete system of medical understanding that persisted for millennia before being overturned.