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Sterling Doctor's Lancet Compendium for Bleeding. This is a very rare antique doctor's lancet compendium Bloodletting silver box tool with tortoise shell implements. So cool, this is a sterling Doctor's Lancet Compendium for Bleeding with tortoise shell implements. A beautiful octagonal metal ( handmade silver box ) lancet case from the 18th to 19th century. The case is ornately carved and in excellent condition, the hinge is sound and the latch closes firmly. Containing 6  lancets in good condition made from black brown tortoise shell. A blood lancet, or simply lancet, is a small medical implement, similar to a small scalpel but with a double-edged blade or needle. Lancets are used to make punctures to obtain small blood specimens. A blood-sampling device, also known as a lancing device, is a reusable instrument equipped with a lancet. The depth of skin penetration can be adjusted for various skin thicknesses. Bloodletting was used to treat almost every disease. One British medical text recommended bloodletting for acne, asthma, cancer, cholera, coma, convulsions, diabetes, epilepsy, gangrene, gout, herpes, indigestion, insanity, jaundice, leprosy, ophthalmia, plague, pneumonia, scurvy, smallpox, stroke, tetanus, tuberculosis, and for some one hundred other diseases. Bloodletting was even used to treat most forms of hemorrhaging such as nosebleed, excessive menstruation, or hemorrhoidal bleeding. Before surgery or at the onset of childbirth, blood was removed to prevent inflammation. Before amputation, it was customary to remove a quantity of blood equal to the amount believed to circulate in the limb that was to be removed. Leeches became especially popular in the early nineteenth century. In the 1830s, the French imported about forty million leeches a year for medical purposes, and in the next decade, England imported six 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.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

Bloodletting (or blood-letting) is the withdrawal of often considerable quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. Bloodletting was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluid were considered to be "humors" whose proper balance maintained health. It was the most common medical practice performed by doctors from antiquity up to the late 19th century, a time span of almost 2,000 years. The practice has been abandoned for all except a few very specific conditions. It is conceivable that historically, in the absence of other treatments for hypertension, bloodletting could sometimes have had a beneficial effect in temporarily reducing blood pressure by a reduction in blood volume. However, since hypertension is very often asymptomatic and thus undiagnosable without modern methods, this effect was unintentional. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the historical use of bloodletting was harmful to patients.

Today, the term phlebotomy refers to the drawing of blood for laboratory analysis or blood transfusion (see Phlebotomy (modern)). Therapeutic phlebotomy refers to the drawing of a unit of blood in specific cases like hemochromatosis, polycythemia vera, porphyria cutanea tarda, etc., to reduce the amount of red blood cells.