[ SCIENCE ] Humourism Debunked.

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Believe it or not they still use "medicinal leeches". But only for certain rare specialized things. Mainly for suturing surgical wounds. Sometimes man made fasteners don't work on certain tiny wounds, and the only thing that does work is the mouth of a leech holding the parts of your tissue together.!

After all of those centuries of using leeches for myriad wrong things they also managed to become adept and using leeches for some right things too apparently.

They also use them to stimulate bloodflow after surgery in areas with very small blood vessels, such as when they've re-attached fingertips.

Interesting.

I and a friend were touring the battlefield at Fredericksburg Va. and then we went to the part of town that they recreated to look Civil era. The sign in the window of an apothecary shop advertised that they had only "the finest Swedish leeches".

Years later I still cant stop laughing.

But hey...I guess leeches are like anything else. They must vary in quality. And maybe it was worth it to import the finest from across the ocean. I wonder if Sweden still does produce first class leeches.

Yeah ... astrology ... the Four Temperments ("Humours") ... purgatives ... homeopathy ... leeches ... blood-letting ... it's amazing how far medical science has come since these primitive practices were en vogue.

Although using leeches to relieve blood congestion after re-attachment surgery makes sense.

Of course, we just call them "leeches", but yes, being certifiably Swedish means a leech is at least 37% better by volume than a lesser southern specimen.

Interesting evolutionary twist: we have very few venomous animals, but plenty of animals that suck blood. Instead of animals that put stuff in your blood, we get animals that just want your blood out of you.

At first I doubted that humourism needed to be debunked. Then I remembered that a quack remedy called "Bile Beans" was sold in Britain as late as the 1980s. (I've seen a lovingly repainted vintage advert for it on the side of a house in York.) So yeah, maybe it's still going. I can just see the ads in alternative health magazines: "Do YOU have an excess of phlegm?"

The scariest alternative health fad has to be "radon spas." When radioctivity was first discovered, but before the dangers of it were understood, there was a short-lived craze for inhaling highly radioactive radon gas. Apparantly there are still a few radon spas in the USA and several European countries, where idiots go to painfully shorten their lives.

Yeah, that's not a good idea. Previous generations of building construction used a lot of aerated autoclaved concrete (called "blue concrete" here) when building residential houses, so us who live in buildings built in the 50's or so often have to do radon-checks because it turns out that blue concrete contains a non-negligible amount of Uranium and releases radon over time. Not good.

That would be a great name for a metal band. "the Fine Swedish Leeches"!

Yeah. Canada and Alaska have blood sucking mosquitos and black flies. But no venomous critters that I know of. The US has the coral snakes, the pit vipers (water moccassins, copper heads, and rattle snakes), and black widow spiders.