The Theory and Practice of Bloodletting
period treatise · 1915
LINK
SUMMARY
Heinrich Stern's 1915 *Theory and Practice of Bloodletting* is the early-20th-century commercial revival of bloodletting as a therapeutic intervention, published in New York 116 years after Benjamin Rush's heroic bloodletting (1799), 50 years after Lister's 1865 antiseptic operation, and 16 years after the Wright brothers' first powered flight. Stern recommended bloodletting for drunkenness, homosexuality, typhoid, influenza, jaundice, arthritis, eczema, and epilepsy, on a Galenic-humoural mechanism Wootton describes as essentially identical to the mechanism Hippocrates would have endorsed. The treatise is the archive's late-Hippocratic outlier: a published medical text from the 1915 New York medical-publishing market that proposes the unmodified ancient Galenic intervention for a contemporary indication list. Wootton (2006, p.251) cites the treatise as a specimen of the persistence of explicitly-disconfirmed Hippocratic therapy into the modern era. The treatise has not been independently corroborated by the archive's research team beyond Wootton's one-paragraph treatment; a full Case bundle anchored to Stern as practitioner is held back pending direct reading of the treatise and acquisition of independent biographical evidence on Stern.
NOTES
Heinrich Stern (dates uncertain; active in New York in the 1910s) was a New York physician whose treatise is preserved in the Internet Archive at the listed URL. The book was published by Rebman Company, a small medical publisher operating in New York and London in the early 20th century. The treatise is included in the archive’s source list as a late-stage instance of the Hippocratic-revival pattern Wootton documents, on the historiographic interest of the persistence of explicitly disconfirmed therapy across the 1865 to 1915 inflection point. A full Case bundle treating Stern as a charismatic practitioner with a defined active period, financial conflicts, and a disconfirmation arc is not constructed here because Wootton’s treatment is a single paragraph and the archive has not yet conducted the independent research that a Case bundle would require. The source is preserved as a research lead for future development.