Season 2 · Episode 1726
2500 Years of Bad Medicine: The Slow Surrender
Bloodletting dominated medicine for 2500 years. Here’s how science finally admitted it was wrong.
My Weird Prompts · Daniel Rosehill
March 29, 202623m 56s
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Show Notes
For 25 centuries, doctors drained blood to cure everything from fevers to madness. This episode traces the agonizingly slow collapse of humoral theory—from ancient Greece to the 19th century—and uncovers why scientific truth often waits for a generation to die before it can triumph. We examine the data that broke the consensus, the crises that forced surrender, and the stubborn institutional inertia that kept leeches in use for millennia.