In England and America, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a last serious attempt was made to revive bloodletting before it died out altogether. A number of Americans defended the limited use of bleeding, especially in the form of venesection. The noted American physician, Henry I. Bowditch, tried in 1872 to arouse support for venesection among his Massachusetts Medical Society colleagues. He noted that venesection declined more than any other medical opinion in the esteem of the physician and the public during the previous half century. At the beginning of his career, he had ignored the request of his patients who wanted annual bloodlettings to "breathe a vein" to maintain good health. He eventually found that to give up the practice entirely was as wrong as to overdo it when severe symptoms of a violent, acute cardiac disease presented themselves. Lung congestion and dropsy were other common disorders that seemed to him to be relieved, at least temporarily, by venesection.[77] In 1875 the Englishman W. Mitchell Clarke, after reviewing the long history of bloodletting and commenting on the abrupt cessation of the practice in his own time, wrote: Experience must, indeed, as Hippocrates says in his first aphorism, be fallacious if we decide that a means of treatment, sanctioned by the use of between two and three thousand years, and upheld by the authority of the ablest men of past times, is finally and forever given up. This seems to me to be the most interesting and important question in connection with this subject. Is the relinquishment of bleeding final? or shall we see by and by, or will our successors see, a resumption of the practice? This, I take it, is a very difficult question to answer; and he would be a very bold man who, after looking carefully through the history of the past, would venture to assert that bleeding will not be profitably employed any more.[78] An intern, Henri A. Lafleur of the newly founded Johns Hopkins Hospital, reported on five patients on whom venesection was performed between 1889 and 1891. Lafleur defended his interest in the subject by calling attention to other recent reports of successes with bleeding, such as that of Dr. Pye-Smith of London. He concluded that at least temporary relief from symptoms due to circulatory disorders, especially those involving the pulmonary system, was achieved through venesection.