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Leech attacking a slug. Blood-sucking leeches use their anterior suckers to connect to hosts for feeding. Once attached, they use a combination of mucus and suction to stay in place while they inject hirudin into the hosts' blood. In general, blood-feeding leeches are non host-specific, and do little harm to their host, dropping off after ...
Cow blood mixed with milk, for example, is a mainstay food of the African Maasai. Many places around the world eat blood sausage. Some societies, such as the Moche, had ritual hematophagy, as well as the Scythians, a nomadic people of Eastern Europe, who drank the blood of the first enemy they killed in battle. Psychiatric cases of patients ...
Hirudin is a naturally occurring peptide in the salivary glands of blood-sucking leeches (such as Hirudo medicinalis) that has a blood anticoagulant property. [2] This is essential for the leeches' habit of feeding on blood, since it keeps a host's blood flowing after the worm's initial puncture of the skin.
In medieval and early modern European medicine, the medicinal leech (Hirudo medicinalis and its congeners H. verbana, H. troctina, and H. orientalis) was used to remove blood from a patient as part of a process to balance the humors that, according to Galen, must be kept in balance for the human body to function properly.
Hirudo verbana feeds on blood (hematophagy). During a blood meal, a leech rhythmically contracts its muscles to draw blood from a host animal into the crop for storage. It can consume over five times its own weight in blood in one feeding. Once satiated, a leech detaches from its host.
Haementeria ghilianii is a species of leech in the Glossiphoniidae family, comprising freshwater proboscis-bearing leeches. Colloquially, they are known as the Amazon giant leech . Following its initial description in 1849, additional details were provided based on specimens from French Guiana in 1899, after which the species was largely ...
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Bloodletting (or blood-letting) is the deliberate withdrawal of blood from a patient to prevent or cure illness and disease. Bloodletting, whether by a physician or by leeches , was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluids were regarded as " humours " that had to remain in proper balance to maintain health.