Bloodletting/ - , letting/ n. 1. Phlebotomy, the act or process of letting blood or bleeding, as by opening a vein or artery. 2. Outmoded medical practice used as a cure for illnesses ranging from fevers to hysteria. Bloodletting is a frank, compelling and at times darkly humorous memoir boldly challenging the silence surrounding one of mental health's last taboos. A close relative of bulimia and anorexia, it is estimated that up to 1 per cent of the population has intentionally harmed itself - yet for the most part it is a behaviour that goes unspoken, dismissed as the attention-seeking actions of prison in-mates or delinquent teenagers. If you had run into Victoria on the street during her darkest days you would never have known the torment she endured. Confident, polite and articulate she could have been your sister, your workmate, your friend, your lover. Yet from her late teens and throughout her twenties Victoria Leatham struggled with the overwhelming desire to hurt herself, a desire that was all-consuming and shaped every aspect of her life. And while not everyone who feels stressed, insecure or depressed will physically turn upon themselves, anyone who has ever felt out of control will recognise the logic that drove her. Today Victoria is a happy, successful 30-something professional who only occasionally glances sideways at the bathroom cabinet.

Winner of the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize An astonishing literary debut centred around four students as they apply to medical school, qualify as doctors and face the realities of working in medicine, from a powerful voice in fiction. Following the interlinked stories of a group of medical students and the unique challenges they face, from the med school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evac missions, and terrifying new viruses. Riveting, convincing and precise, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures looks with rigorous honesty at the lives of doctors and their patients, bringing us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and temptations that surge around us all. In this masterful collection, Vincent Lam weaves together black humour, investigations of both common and extraordinary moral dilemmas, and a sometimes shockingly realistic portrait of today’s medical profession.

Detailed information for acupuncturists and other medical practitioners on how to safely and effectively perform Chinese Bloodletting, with an emphasis on the bloodletting system of Master Tung Ching Chang.

Dr Brain has translated the works by the physician Galen on bloodletting, which provides by far the most comprehensive account of the practice in antiquity.

When competing medical society doctors rebuff his license application, Dr. Jabez Allen conceals his medical practice by opening the first drugstore in rural New York. Dr. Allen and his Underground Railroad activist wife endure a lifetime defined by service, and challenged by loss. Consumption, Anthrax, Cholera, The Civil War and Melancholia. Dr. Allen cares for poor and wealthy alike, including the daughter of a U.S. president, and never abandons the motto painted on his first office window, "No Cure, No Pay." Dr. Jabez Allen's drugstore opened in 1834 and still serves the village of East Aurora, NY. Based on actual events, 'Bloodletting and Germs' is the memoir Dr. Allen might have written.

The first text on bloodletting therapy for Western practitioners of Chinese medicine, this authoritative text explores the theory and function of bloodletting, and provides detailed instruction on its clinical use. Bloodletting therapy, which works to remove internal and external disruptions to the system through the withdrawal of small quantities of blood, has numerous benefits, especially concerning the treatment of complex or chronic disease. Yet the technique is often met with alarm in the West and side-lined in favour of less controversial treatments such as fine-needle acupuncture, and moxibustion. This book provides a concise overview of its theory, historical and contemporary relevance, and clinical guidance. With detailed reference to the classic texts, the author clarifies the fundamental Chinese medical theory related to blood and the network vessels, and provides an in-depth discussion of the benefits of and practice guidelines for bloodletting. The book includes a chapter on the classical acupuncture techniques of Tung Ching Chang whose work is attracting increasing attention in the West. Through the exploration of classic texts and contemporary standards, the book provides everything needed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the technique and to encourage its use as a viable treatment option in the West. It will be an invaluable addition to the resources available for acupuncturists, as well as students and practitioners of Chinese medicine more generally, including those interested in all Chinese approaches to health.

Over the course of a single generation, without significant discussion or debate, a key practice of traditional medicine was almost completely abandoned in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. K. Codell Carter’s book describes how and why bloodletting was abandoned, noting that it was part of a process in which innovation was required so that modern scientific medicine could begin. This book is a masterful study on the collapse of a traditional medical practice. Bloodletting had been a prominent medical therapy in early nineteenth-century Europe and can be traced back to Greek and Roman physicians. The Hippocratic corpus contains several discussions of bloodletting. Galen, the most famous physician in classical antiquity, wrote tracts explaining and defending the practice. It was employed in ancient Egypt and is the most commonly mentioned therapy in the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, it was practiced in virtually every part of the ancient world. Even though the practice abruptly ceased, there was little argument against it or reason to believe it ineffective. In reality, bloodletting actually worked. However, the rise of modern medicine required not just a change in how disease and causation were conceived, but also a change in the role of medicine in society. It has been claimed that the collapse of traditional medicine was a precondition for the rise of modern medicine, but there has been little support for this assertion before now. Carter provides this missing support. The result is a fascinating study in the history of medical practice and social expectations.

“A gripping political thriller readers may find hard to put down.”—Dallas Morning News Keita Ali is an elite runner living in Zantoroland, a poor, fictional island that is erupting in political violence. When his father, a journalist, is murdered, Keita escapes to the wealthy nation of Freedom State—an imagined country much like our own. A stateless refugee without documentation, Keita must hide from the authorities even as he races marathons to support himself and ransom his sister who has been kidnapped. This tension-filled novel by the best-selling author of Someone Knows My Name is an astute exploration of dislocation, starting all over again, and the desperate need for home and community.

It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from the originates like other affections. Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, because it is not at all like to other diseases. And this notion of its divinity is kept up by their inability to comprehend it, and the simplicity of the mode by which it is cured, for men are freed from it by purifications and incantations. But if it is reckoned divine because it is wonderful, instead of one there are many diseases which would be sacred; for, as I will show, there are others no less wonderful and prodigious, which nobody imagines to be sacred. The quotidian, tertian, and quartan fevers, seem to me no less sacred and divine in their origin than this disease, although they are not reckoned so wonderful. And I see men become mad and demented from no manifest cause, and at the same time doing many things out of place; and I have known many persons in sleep groaning and crying out, some in a state of suffocation, some jumping up and fleeing out of doors, and deprived of their reason until they awaken, and afterward becoming well and rational as before, although they be pale and weak; and this will happen not once but frequently. And there are many and various things of the like kind, which it would be tedious to state particularly. They who first referred this malady to the gods appear to me to have been just such persons as the conjurors, purificators, mountebanks, and charlatans now are, who give themselves out for being excessively religious, and as knowing more than other people. Such persons, then, using the divinity as a pretext and screen of their own inability to of their own inability to afford any assistance, have given out that the disease is sacred, adding suitable reasons for this opinion, they have instituted a mode of treatment which is safe for themselves, namely, by applying purifications and incantations, and enforcing abstinence from baths and many articles of food which are unwholesome to men in diseases. Of sea substances, the surmullet, the blacktail, the mullet, and the eel; for these are the fishes most to be guarded against. And of fleshes, those of the goat, the stag, the sow, and the dog: for these are the kinds of flesh which are aptest to disorder the bowels. Of fowls, the cock, the turtle, and the bustard, and such others as are reckoned to be particularly strong. And of potherbs, mint, garlic, and onions; for what is acrid does not agree with a weak person. And they forbid to have a black robe, because black is expressive of death; and to sleep on a goat’s skin, or to wear it, and to put one foot upon another, or one hand upon another; for all these things are held to be hindrances to the cure. All these they enjoin with reference to its divinity, as if possessed of more knowledge, and announcing beforehand other causes so that if the person should recover, theirs would be the honor and credit; and if he should die, they would have a certain defense, as if the gods, and not they, were to blame, seeing they had administered nothing either to eat or drink as medicines, nor had overheated him with baths, so as to prove the cause of what had happened. But I am of opinion that (if this were true) none of the Libyans, who live in the interior, would be free from this disease, since they all sleep on goats’ skins, and live upon goats’ flesh; neither have they couch, robe, nor shoe that is not made of goat’s skin, for they have no other herds but goats and oxen. But if these things, when administered in food, aggravate the disease, and if it be cured by abstinence from them, godhead is not the cause at all; nor will purifications be of any avail, but it is the food which is beneficial and prejudicial, and the influence of the divinity vanishes.