# The Open Body Closed: A Rationale for the Abandonment of Bloodletting, Based on Nineteenth-Century Swedish Medicine

## TL;DR

This paper explains why bloodletting was abandoned in 19th-century Sweden by analyzing medical texts and reports.

## Contribution

It introduces a new perspective on the shift from an 'open' to a 'closed' medical model as the reason for abandoning bloodletting.

## Key findings

- Bloodletting was used to restore regular bodily flows, not to balance humours.
- A shift in medical thinking from open to closed body models led to the abandonment of bloodletting.
- This change occurred decades before the rise of bacteriology and scientific medicine.

## Abstract

This article contains an analysis of the use and abandonment of bloodletting in Sweden 1820–1900. Close readings of over 8,000 yearly reports by Swedish provincial doctors and popular medical handbooks, journals and notes from medical societies have been used, as well as key word searches meant to illustrate overarching tendencies. One result is that quantitative balance between humours was not an aim of therapeutic bleeding in this context. Rather, bloodletting was mainly used to reinstate regular flows in a hydraulic model of the body. It is argued that a shift from focusing on smooth flows to seeing bleeding as blood loss marked a transformation of the medical imagination from working with an ‘open’, malleable body to a ‘closed’, fixed body. This helps explain why therapeutic bleeding, for millennia the most important practice in medical practitioners’ arsenal, was silently abandoned decades before the breakthrough of bacteriology and scientific medicine.