ABSTRACT
In the early 1850s, William Pultney Alison, professor of Practice of Physic at the University of Edinburgh, was nearing the end of an illustrious medical career. Alison, who was certainly the most subtle and profound of the many participants in the controversy, explicitly allowed that the rise of modern pathology contributed to the decline of bloodletting, but he denied that the change in therapy could "be explained merely in this way". Alison and his followers seem usually to have regarded change of type as a theory about the human constitution—about human vulnerability to disease. In 1857, William O. Markham entered the bloodletting debate. Like Alison, John Hughes Bennett, and Thomas Watson, Markham was a leading figure in contemporary British medicine. Bloodletting seemed to have no place in treating their new patients, and its use declined precipitously. But since bloodletting was the central therapy in chimbuki medicine, with the decline of bloodletting, chimbuki medicine itself was in serious jeopardy.
