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Leeches were often gathered by leech collectors and were eventually farmed in large numbers. A unique 19th-century "Leech House" survives in Bedale, North Yorkshire on the bank of the Bedale Beck, used to store medicinal leeches until the early 20th century. Manchester Royal Infirmary used 50,000 leeches a year in 1831. The price of leeches ...
Leeches became especially popular in the early 19th century. In the 1830s, the French imported about 40 million leeches a year for medical purposes, and in the next decade, England imported 6 million leeches a year from France alone. Through the early decades of the century, hundreds of millions of leeches were used by physicians throughout Europe.
Leeches have been used in medicine from ancient times until the 19th century to draw blood from patients. In modern times, leeches find medical use in treatment of joint diseases such as epicondylitis and osteoarthritis, extremity vein diseases, and in microsurgery, while hirudin is used as an anticoagulant drug to treat blood-clotting disorders.
Mounting hospital bills can really suck -- and apparently, so can the cure for those ailments.
Franz Anton Maulbertsch's The Quack (c. 1785) shows barber surgeons at work. Bloodletting set of a barber surgeon, beginning of 19th century, Märkisches Museum Berlin. The barber surgeon was one of the most common European medical practitioners of the Middle Ages, generally charged with caring for soldiers during and after battle.
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.
Hirudo verbana has long been used as a medicinal leech under the species H. medicinalis, but has recently been recognized as a separate species distinct from the traditional or European medicinal leech of that name. [2] [3]
Hirudo is a genus of leeches of the family Hirudinidae. It was described by Carl Linnaeus in his landmark 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae. [2] The two well-accepted species within the genus are: [3] Hirudo medicinalis Linnaeus, 1758; Hirudo nipponia Whitman, 1886