ABSTRACT
In the early nineteenth century, medical theory and practice were closely bound up with moral issues and with social roles. The prevalence of bleeding in early nineteenth-century medicine simply reflects physicians' judgment that most people deviated from moral and social norms by way of excess rather than by way of deficiency. Victor Turner has described the work of chimbuki among Ndembu, a tribe in Zambia. He concludes that the chimbuki's "main endeavor was to see that individuals were capable of playing their social roles successfully in a traditional structure of social position. Illness was for him a mark of undue deviation from the norm". Early nineteenth-century physicians were not the first to regard bloodletting as an artificial parallel to menstruation and to hemorrhoidal bleeding: Galen took the same position centuries earlier. Bloodletting could have provided roughly similar psychological benefits that parallel rites seem to have provided in other societies when social and sexual roles need to be adopted or reconfirmed.
