Going to the Doctor 1 If you go to a doctor’s office today, the doctor will usually know the cause of your illness and how to treat it. That was not true of doctors 200 years ago. No matter what symptoms you had, the treatment would be the same. Doctors did the best they could with what they knew at the time, but their knowledge was limited. The practice of medicine has changed a lot since then, both in understanding what causes diseases and knowing how to treat them.

2 In the 1700s, doctors believed that people’s bodies held four fluids called “humors.” These matched the elements of the natural world: air, water, earth, and fire. The four humors had to be balanced for a person to be healthy. One of these four was blood. Doctors believed that a person who had too much “bad blood” would become sick, and the best way to keep people healthy or to cure a problem was to get rid of the bad blood.

3 For hundreds of years, doctors used bloodletting to treat patients with any number of problems, from fevers to back pain to broken bones. To remove the “bad blood,” a doctor made a small cut in an arm or near a wound. The doctor then collected some amount of blood in a bowl. In most cases, the doctor would continue the bleeding until the patient was close to passing out. People believed this would get rid of the bad blood so that the patient’s body could become balanced again.

4 The practice was so common that most doctors carried bloodletting pouches and kits with them. These kits contained tools for making small cuts, but people who didn’t want to go to the doctor for bloodletting could go to a barber instead. Barbers performed the same procedure on people to help them stay healthy. The emblem for a barber shop was a red and white striped pole. Red represented blood, and white was for the bandages used to stop the bleeding.

5 George Washington died in 1799 from what modern doctors think was a throat infection. Like most people at the time, he believed in bloodletting, and asked to be bled when he became very sick with a sore throat. During his brief illness, doctors drained a lot of blood from his body. They hoped it would cure him, but it did not; Washington died twenty-four hours later. Bloodletting probably did not kill him, but it certainly did not help him recover.

6 In the early 1800s, if a person was injured, a doctor might perform surgery. This could involve cutting off an arm or leg that was badly injured and could not be saved, or removing a bullet or other object from a wound. In those days, more people died from surgery than were saved.

7 One of the reasons so many people died then was that doctors did not know about bacteria. They did not clean the germs from their hands or medical tools between treating patients. Many patients got infections and died, but doctors did not understand the real cause of death.

8 In 1867, British surgeon Joseph Lister determined that carefully cleaning hands, medical equipment, and wounds could greatly reduce the risk of infections, but American doctors were slow to accept his views. It was the treatment of another American president that helped change their minds.

9 In 1881, President James Garfield was shot as he entered a train station. Doctors tried to remove the bullet. However, they did not clean their hands or tools. They tended to him for about ten weeks before he died. Doctors found that he died from an infection rather than from the bullet. That discovery helped bring about some important changes in medicine.

10 Today, doctors know much more than they did in the past and use the best information available. We are lucky that modern medicine is as advanced as it is, and offers so many benefits. Even so, some of their methods may change someday, as scientists make new discoveries.

Explain why doctors long ago used bloodletting to treat their patients. Use text evidence to support your answer.