ABSTRACT
Humoral medicine, with its internally coherent system of interconnected bodies, was a fruitful source of political analogies. Even as they illuminated the macrocosmic figurative bodies of states, however, these analogies turned on the actual flesh and blood bodies of individuals. My purpose in this essay is to examine the way contemporary knowledge about physiology and therapeutics enabled bloodletting, a procedure central to early modern medical practice, to be adopted as a trope that could medicalize and hence justify violently injurious wounding.
