Bloodletting Instruments in the National Museum of History and Technology

Davis, Audrey B., 1934-Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
289K words
Chapters
29

Tags

English Originals Medicine Medical HistoryMedical DevicesMuseum CollectionsHygiene ConceptsHistorical ReappraisalInstrument CollectionTechnical EvolutionBloodletting TherapyScience EnlightenmentCase Analysis

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Bloodletting Instruments in the National Museum of History and Technology by Appel et al.Author: Davis, Audrey B., 1934-,Language: English, Class: RM: Medicine: Therapeutics, Pharmacology, Release Date: Jul 7, 2010

Editor's review

This booklet is a catalog of the bleeding-instrument collection held by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology, prepared by medical historian Audrey B. Davis. Its core value lies in presenting the genealogy of bloodletting tools in the form of an object catalog: from lancets and leeches to improved bleeding devices, with descriptions of form, material, and use. It is a reliable reference for the study of premodern medical practice and the history of medical technology. The text consists mainly of collection descriptions, clearly structured and dense with terminology; it reads more like a museum object catalog than a popular medical narrative. It is suitable as supplementary material for courses in medical history, science museology, and the history of technology, and for collectors interested in the evolution of medical instruments. It offers no modern medical advice and does not tell the full story of the rise and fall of bloodletting; readers need some background knowledge to absorb the terminology.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the collection notes and classification framework first, then go through the instrument entries one by one, matching form descriptions to uses.
  2. Consult background material on the history of bloodletting alongside the book, so you are not looking at objects without their medical context.
  3. Turn the book's instrument categories into table notes to compare the evolution and regional differences of different devices.
  4. If using it for writing, focus on extracting accession numbers and form descriptions as object-based evidence for citation.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Does this book contain a complete history of bloodletting? Not entirely. Its main body is the description and classification of bleeding instruments in the National Museum collection, offering technical-history information at the object level; the rise and fall of bloodletting and its social context require other works on medical history.
Can non-medical readers understand it? They can grasp the general idea, but the terminology and object descriptions are dense, and it will feel dry without background knowledge. It is advisable to first learn the basic principles and historical periods of bloodletting before going into specific entries.
Can the instrument information in the book be cited directly? It can be cited as object-based collection material, but the source should be noted as a museum collection catalog, and its publication and edition information verified. For medical interpretation, cite specialized medical-history research rather than drawing conclusions from the catalog alone.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Davis, Audrey B., 1934- Author · American · 1934

Audrey B. Davis (born 1934) is an American historian of science whose work focuses on the development of medical technology and medical instruments. Approaching the subject through museum collections, she studies the forms and uses of medical devices. Her representative work, Bloodletting Instruments in the National Museum of History and Technology, examines the bloodletting instruments held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of History and Technology and traces the medical ideas behind these once widely used tools. Because public information is limited, details of her life and a complete bibliography remain unclear, and only one of her works is held in this collection. Judging from the available material, her writing emphasizes object-based research and the careful use of historical sources, serving readers in medical history, the history of technology, and museum studies with concrete and reliable reference points for understanding modern medical practice.