Phlebotomy, Venesection—terms to signify bleeding—are not often heard in our day, because we have ceased to believe that the best way to make a bank or a body healthy is to squander its capital; but in our author’s time the physician went around with a hatful of lancets on his person all the time, and took a hack at every patient whom he found still alive. He robbed his man of pounds and pounds of blood at a single operation. The details of this sort in this book make terrific reading. Apparently even the healthy did not escape, but were bled twelve times a year, on a particular day of the month, and exhaustively purged besides. Here is a specimen of the vigorous old-time practice; it occurs in our author’s adoring biography of a Doctor Aretæus, a licensed assassin of Homer’s time, or thereabouts: ‘In a Quinsey he used Venesection, and allow’d the Blood to flow till the Patient was ready to faint away.’ There is no harm in trying to cure a headache—in our day. You can’t do it, but you get more or less entertainment out of trying, and that is something; besides, you live to tell about it, and that is more. A century or so ago you could have had the first of these features in rich variety, but you might fail of the other once—and once would do. I quote: ‘As Dissections of Persons who have died of severe Headaches, which have been related by Authors, are too numerous to be inserted in this Place, we shall here abridge some of the most curious and important Observations relating to this Subject, collected by the celebrated _Bonetus_.’ The celebrated Bonetus’s ‘Observation No. 1’ seems to me a sufficient sample, all by itself, of what people used to have to stand any time between the creation of the world and the birth of your father and mine when they had the disastrous luck to get a ‘Head-ach’: ‘A certain Merchant, about forty Years of Age, of a Melancholic Habit, and deeply involved in the Cares of the World, was, during the Dog-days, seiz’d with a violent pain of his Head, which some time after oblig’d him to keep his Bed. ‘I, being call’d, order’d Venesection in the Arms, the Application of Leeches to the Vessels of his Nostrils, Forehead, and Temples, as also to those behind his Ears; I likewise prescrib’d the Application of Cupping-glasses, with Scarification, to his Back: But, notwithstanding these Precautions, he dy’d. If any Surgeon, skill’d in Arteriotomy, had been present, I should have also order’d that Operation.’