‘Meanders of [the] Purple Flood’: Blood and Bloodletting in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Medicine

Abstract

This essay considers understandings and representations of blood and bloodletting in a range of eighteenth-century medical and literary texts. Reflecting a historical moment of complex and uneven transition, these texts present models of blood that are variously orthodox, idiosyncratic, and imaginative. Representations of bloodletting, in particular, show doctors and laypeople, including women, contesting, welcoming, and orchestrating the therapy, which could both injure and soothe. Taken together, the texts this essay explores reinforce, refute, and enlarge humoral, mechanist, rational–empirical, vitalist, and other master paradigms, commonly conceiving body, mind, spirit, and earth as intricately connected and illustrating how medical ideas in this period were formed not merely through the consensus of an elite group of male authorities but also through the co-existence of a range of variable, oftentimes conflicting, theories; through dissent and debate; through the voices of non-experts; and through a reliance on the creative imagination.