Re-imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter

While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine. Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the question: what work can the non-human animal achieve for the history of medicine? We do so in the light of the conceptual possibilities opened up by the rapidly emerging field of ‘animal studies’. This interdisciplinary and sophisticated body of work has, in various ways, revealed the value of the ‘animal’ as a tool for exploring the co-constitution of species identity. We asked ourselves, surely, in our present biomedical world, this must be an area that we as medical historians are best placed to comment on; and what better place to start than the well-known, yet surprisingly little-studied, medical leech? Jumping in with all our feet, we turned to Donna Haraway for advice and orientation. Haraway, whose work within the history of science and medicine probed the human and animal boundaries long before it was the intellectual fashion to do so, has positioned herself as a leading – though not uncontroversial – voice in the field of animal studies. In 1997, she turned to the OncoMouse, a genetically altered mouse predisposed to develop cancer and designed as a standard laboratory tool, in order to explore the complex interactions that occur across the boundaries of human, animal and machine in the late twentieth-century biomedical sciences. Here, we attempt something similar, but for the leech in early nineteenth-century medical practice. Following Haraway’s figurative cyborgian approach, we will emphasise the always ‘leaky distinction. . . between animal–human (organism) and machine’. During the