The trade in medicinal leeches in the southern Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century.
نویسنده
چکیده
The practice of bloodletting or phlebotomy was a predominant feature of western medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the use of medicinal leeches as a mild form of letting blood achieved immense notoriety in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, especially in France. The almost insatiable demand for leeches drove a lucrative trade in these animals, the history of which has never been critically documented outside Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, France, England and other countries of western Europe had virtually depleted their indigenous stocks of the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis. To satisfy demand they were forced to import staggering numbers of this species from eastern Europe and the Levant, mainly by laborious overland transport.' Throughout most of the nineteenth century the colonial powers had great difficulty in meeting their own medical needs, let alone in supplying their colonies. Unfortunately, hardly anything is known about how colonial outposts satisfied their own demands for this much valued commodity. Of special interest in this context is Mauritius, an Anglo-French colony located in the southern Indian Ocean. This paper reveals that in the nineteenth century local pharmacists in Mauritius developed a longstanding alternative source of medicinal leeches by importing them directly from southern India by ship.
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Medical History
دوره 43 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1999