Leeches for sale: The economy of bloodletting in France, 1827-1836
I found this great post on drug shortages that appeared in BMJ today. Among all of the other great gems in it, was this incredibly interesting article on the creation of a mechanical bloodletting device. Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière, a French anatomist and inventor, created the “mechanical leech”, a device intended to extract a controlled amount of blood from the body. Sarlandiere intended the device to replace leeches, which were subject to increasing demand, were becoming expensive, were difficult to cultivate, and were subject to shortages in the Netherlands, who was a large producer of leeches at the time.
A paper was written on the device back in 2009, and within there is a dataset of leech imports and exports to France, which includes data on the monetary value of leeches and public consumption. Of course, I couldn’t resist pulling this data out and doing something with it (despite having better things to do.)
Here is the data, pulled from yet another paper (Alexandre E Baudrimont, Adolphe J Blanqui, et al., Dictionnaire de l’industrie manufacturie`re, commerciale et agricole, Paris, J-B Baillière, 1833–1841, pp. 25–30.):
| Year | Number of leeches imported | Value in Francs | National consumption | Exports | Import export ratio | Value per leech |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1827 | 33653694 | 1009611 | 33456744 | 196950 | 170.87 | 0.03 |
| 1828 | 26981900 | 809457 | 26689100 | 292800 | 92.15 | 0.03 |
| 1829 | 44573754 | 1337212 | 44069848 | 503906 | 88.46 | 0.03 |
| 1830 | 35485000 | 1064550 | 34745848 | 739250 | 48 | 0.03 |
| 1831 | 36487975 | 1094639 | 35245875 | 1242100 | 29.38 | 0.03 |
| 1832 | 57487000 | 1724610 | 55591700 | 1895300 | 30.33 | 0.03 |
| 1833 | 41654300 | 1249629 | 40785650 | 868650 | 47.95 | 0.03 |
| 1834 | 21885965 | 656579 | 21006865 | 879100 | 24.90 | 0.03 |
| 1835 | 22560440 | 676813 | 21323910 | 1236530 | 18.24 | 0.03 |
| 1836 | 19736800 | 592104 | 18721555 | 1015245 | 19.44 | 0.03 |
Of course, I am fascinated with this. The number of leeches exported from France rose during this period as did the market price of each leech. Though the entire industry would eventually collapse because other medical advances of the nineteenth century would supercede it, it is clear that increased demand and expense led to innovation to create devices to replace it. I don’t know whether the “mechanical leech” led to the development of other medical devices, but would like to think that even batshit ideas like how swamp worms draw out blood to cure any and all medical conditions would lead to the creation of methods which do improve health.
Is blogging even meaningful anymore?
I started this blog way back in 2007, when I was a Masters student at the University of Michigan. At the time, it felt like a good way to get writing out there, and communicate ideas in a public forum. When I was at my peak on this blog (and my life, it seems) I was writing daily, sometimes posting the data analyses equivalent to many (low quality) published scientific papers, writing travel logs, doing interviews, broadcasting psychological traumas, posting photos… it was a good time.
At some point, I lost focus, got busy with other things, got on the wrong track, the right track, it really isn’t clear to me what happened, but I posted less and wrote less. The result was that my writing suffered, because the daily posts provided a great opportunity to keep my writing in shape, and explore interesting scientific topics in depth without worrying about the bureaucratic demands of peer review or research collaborators. While peer review and research collaborations are important, every science needs a forum with which to explore ideas.
Now, though, as I move back into my academic career, I am wondering…. is blogging worth it anymore? I just read Rachel Strohm’s final post . Rachel started blogging about the same time I did, and has since moved on to a fruitful career in development and academia and now lives in Kenya. She has recently stopped blogging, noting that “The development blogging ecosystem is basically dead. ” (I do wonder if her move to Kenya might have killed her motivation for blogging, the same way it killed mine.) I have also noticed that the authors of several blogs I used to read have also moved on.
Strohm offers that direct newsletter updates and Twitter might be a better platform for dissemination blog-like information for people. I think Twitter is a pretty terrible platform for anything at all outside of haranguing right wingers or sending cat videos, so I am not sure that it would do what blogging would have done for me. While I do not have a large Twitter presence, it seems to be a major time suck, with little reward and multiple costs (like blood pressure.)
Newsletters are interesting. Even as a musician, I find that directly engaging people who might be interested in my music is far better than any of the social media platforms, which do their best to make sure that no one ever sees what you do, unless you have a thousand dollar PR budget.
I liked the blogging format. I still do. I think it could still work, but wonder…. do people even read long form writing anymore? Does it have any impact? Is blogging going the way journalism is? What is a good platform anymore? Does writing mean anything at all anymore?
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