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problems such as polycythaemia (an abnormally high concentration of hemoglobin in the blood) and hemochromatosis (a hereditary disorder in which excess iron is absorbed through the gut and deposited in tissues).
    For thousands of years, physicians have used leeches as a bloodletting device. They, like some other animals, such as mosquitoes, lampreys, and vampire bats, have figured out that sucking other animals’ blood is an effective shortcut to a rich, nutritious meal. I wonder who, in medical cultures in ancient Egypt, Greece, and India, came up with the bright idea of ushering leeches onto human skin for the purposes of bloodletting. Someone must have stepped back and muttered, “But there must be a use for this worm that annoys me so.”
    Leeches still have a role in modern medicine, particularly in reconstructive or plastic surgery. They dilate the blood vessels and prevent the blood from clotting, and are especially useful after surgery in promoting the flow of venous blood. They have proved useful in the re­attachment of body parts such as fingers, hands, toes, ears, noses, and nipples. Because veins have thin walls, they can be hard to stitch together in surgery. Until the body figures out how to do so again, leeches secrete an enzyme that helps move the blood into the thin and sometimes damaged veins of reattached body parts. They are energetic little devils. A leech can suck more than three times its body weight in blood.
    It may be troublesome to imagine a leech — which is basically a bloodsucking worm — attaching itself to your body. But other forms of traditional phlebotomy jump out as being far more invasive, and potentially lethal. I would take a leech over a human bloodletter, any day! Clearly, others feel the same way. Eric M. Meslin, associate dean for bioethics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, told me that while he was visiting the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul in April 2013, he came across a vendor who conducted a brisk business selling leeches. Identified on his storefront as “Prof Dr. Suluk,” the man sold leeches for purposes such as migraines, cellulite, low back pain, eczema, and hemorrhoids.
    In 400 BCE , the Greek historian Herodotus recommended cupping (the use of a partial vacuum to draw blood) as a means to promote appetite, digestion, and menstrual flow, and to resolve problems such as headaches and fainting. If blood is removed from behind the ears, he said, it brings about a natural repose. Other spots from which blood has traditionally been let include the knees and elbows. Bloodletting was certainly not limited to one cultural, religious, or geographic group. In addition to the Greeks and the Romans, bloodletting was carried out in Islamic cultures (for example, the Arab queen Zenobia killed King Jothima Al Abrash in this manner). Hindus practised it too.
    Bloodletting also entered into ancient Jewish traditions. As Fred Rosner wrote in 1986 in an article for the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine , in the third to the fifth centuries CE , the Sages of the Babylonian Talmud held that a learned man should not live in a town that had no bloodletter. Bloodletting was recommended for headaches and plethora (an excess of blood).
    The medieval scholar and rabbi Maimonides wrote about the benefits and hazards of bloodletting, but not all Jewish writers believed in the practice. The Old Testament contains, in Leviticus, a prohibition against cutting into the skin. Maimonides said that before bloodletting, a patient should recite a supplication to God for healing, and that after treatment concluded that patient should say, “Blessed art Thou, Healer of the Living.”
    Over the years, many famous people have died of bloodletting. Charles II, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1660 to 1685, should have been inspired by his own family history to pay close attention to the safeguarding of his own blood. After all, his own father, Charles