Bleeding and putrefaction

Blood-letting, close to the habitual purgation of the body, was considered the universal remedy and prevention for every disease. It counter-balanced the ingested substances, and the effects of the ambient, through a moderate evacuation, keeping blood in the due thinness, freshness and fluidity. In his treatise at the beginning of the

238

Francis Bacon, History naturall, pp. 43-50; Alexander Ross, Arcana Microcosmi, pp. 25-28.

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121 seventeenth century the physician Simon Harwards recommended phlebotomy for almost every kind of disease, though with some attention regarding gender, constitution and age of the patient and those sicknesses which inflamed the blood. The main idea behind blood-letting was that of a plethoric blood, that is an excess of it, which stagnated in the body, polluting it. Such belief was further connected with the excess of the humours in the blood, which kept or spoiled its quality and which depended on the ingested type and quantity of food.240 If consumption entailed an excessive heating of blood, the main reason for which bleeding was employed was the over-abundance of the moisture, the vital and materic substance converted into the humours that risked suffocating the spirits, while thickening and obstructing their container. The final result was always the dissolution of the body, but the danger here was not represented by the loss, the dryness and the ghostly appearance which, for example, denoted both the syphilitic and the person affected by tuberculosis. It was not the menace of the ambient which depredated the body, but on the contrary, corruption, which though connected to the outside, grew and multiplied in the body invading and deforming it from the inside. Skin-diseases, the measles and buboes of the plague were the evidence of this eruptive internal decay, whose first passage toward the physical destruction was a putrid, monstrous replacement. The last balance to save was between the two opposing, equally vital and deadly elements of fire and water. An excess of fire led from the original purification to the disintegration, while en excess of humidity lead from the reparation to the drowning of the spirits.

As a preventive cure, beside purges and diet, Italian doctors asserted the utility of the “fountain” or ruttorio, an artificial wound kept open in the flesh by the insertion of hard objects, as for example chick-peas or small metal plates. Through this sore the virulent, smelling humours were discharged and the blood was cleansed of those excrements that the normal bodily evacuations (sweat, urine, menstruation) did not expel. The doctor Scipione Mercuri also advised the practice of scottatura that is a wound obtained through burning children affected by epileptic convulsions behind the neck. In this case the purifying action of the fire was thought to consume the wicked, stagnating humour, renovating the blood. As Camporesi notes, in some parts of Italy, as in Florence, the burning or boiling was practised during the same day of baptism. In the popular mind the evil and the disease mixed together and the ritual

240

Roy Porter, Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and Health. The British Experience 1650-1850. (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), pp. 49-50; Simon Howards, Phlebotomy. (London: 1601); Nicholas Culpeper,

122 purification corresponded to a physical fiery cleansing of the infectious humours that embodied the sin after birth.241

Another diffused healing method to drain the plethoric humours, which relied on the porosity of the body, was “cupping”, that is the employment of glasses heated in hot water. So Culpeper suggested: “apply them close to the part of the body to be cupped; as they cool, so the Air in them will condense, and to avoid Vacuum, draw the humours through the pores of the skin”. Cupping was a milder blood-letting, which did not assault the body, harming it, but instead disrupted the surfacing capillaries, attracting the subtler part of blood in the form of vapours.242

Among the diseases that came from putrefaction was what Culpeper defined generically as rotten fever, and more specifically plague and smallpox. Rotten fever was the manifestation of the corruption of the humours and depended much on the structure of the bodies. Sanguine and fleshy constitutions, apparently the healthier ones, were the most suitable for this disease, due to the richness of blood and to the poor cooling action of the air, which could ended in the growth of excrements and pollution. Yet air as well has not only a positive refrigerating rule. The external environment could be one of the causes of pestilences and contagious diseases, which entered the body and altered the humours passing through the corrupted air that rose from unnatural heat, droughts, great rains, putrefied, unburied corpses. Writing at the end of the sixteenth century Simon Kellwaye explained how, once in the body, the plague proceeded from melancholic blood, that is a blood were coldness and dryness prevailed, inflaming and suffocating the spirits and erupting in botches and bubbles on the surface. The only real internal factor that helped the plague in its development was sin: the vitiated humours depended on a religious disposition of man which, beyond him, affected the surrounding human and natural context. In the words of another physician, Thomas Sherwood:

There are divers causes of this disease. The first is sin, which ought to be repented of. The second an infected and corrupted air, which should be avoided. The third an evill diet, which should be amended. The fourth are evill humours heaped together in the body, being apt to putrifie, and beget a Fever,

241

Piero Camporesi, La Carne Impassibile, pp. 150-154; Scipione Mercuri, Degli errori popolari

d’Italia. (Verona: 1645), pp. 332, 417.

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123 which must be taken away by convenient medicines.243

So the first preventive or healing effects were obtained by praying and repenting; purging pills, decoctions of lenitive herbs, emetics, diuretics and of course bleeding followed.

Smallpox was a sickness deeply related to the plague, whose differences were mainly displayed in the swollen, but less disfigured aspect of the patient and the milder violence of the pains. It was caused by vitiated, evil air and by the accumulation of wasted humours in the blood. The great number of children figuring among its victims was attributed to the polluted menstrual blood in which they were generated. Due to the youth of the patients, bleeding was not always advised. Kellwaye recommended for example not to bleed from the child’s arm, provoking an excessive evacuation. Whitaker, on the same subject, advanced a stronger and significant opposition to blood-letting, affirming that through it the body discharged the putrefied blood, but the responsible humours were not repaired. Up to the seventeenth century a sympathetic cure, called “the red treatment”, was employed. The patient was surrounded by red things, clothed in red and healed with red drinks and food. The aim was obvious. Through the colour red the brightness and freshness of the blood was restored. Smallpox also provides us an example of how medical opinions diverged. Even if the origin of it, and all the other diseases, was placed in the unbalanced blood, there was no definite agreement or division between the consumptive and the corruptive agents. Thus while many physician advised bleeding and sweating to purge the body, during smallpox, the famous doctor Thomas Sydenham proposed a “cooling therapy”, to repair the dispirited bodily fluids.244 Finally, as the idea of the relationship between sin and the plague may suggest, the blood was only the vehicle, transporting the agents of the reasonable soul. This means that also passions, feelings, spiritual or intellectual dispositions could influence its movement. There was a lack of clear distinction that we are going to investigate, for

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Simon Kellwaye, A defensatiue against the plague contayning two partes or treatises: the first,

shewing the meanes how to preserue vs from the dangerous contagion thereof: the second, how to cure those that are infected therewith. Whereunto is annexed a short treatise of the small poxe: shewing how to gouerne and helpe those that are infected therewith. (London: Privately Printed, 1593); Thomas

Sherwood, The charitable pestmaster, or, The cure of the plague conteining a few short and necessary

instructions how to preserve the body from infection of the plagve as also to cure those that are infected : together with a little treatise concerning the cure of the small pox. (1641), Ch.1

244

Simon Kellwaye, A defensatiue against the plague; Thomas Whitaker, An elenchus of opinions

concerning the cure of the small pox together with problematicall questions concerning the cure of the French pest.(1661); Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society, p. 51

124 which mental disease, emotions, dreams depended upon concrete substances and produced on the body the same effects of sickness.