Excerpt from The Body by Bill Bryson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I die hard," Washington croaked as his well-meaning doctors relentlessly sapped him. No one knows precisely what Washington's complaint was, but it might have been no more than a minor throat infection that required a little rest. As it was, the illness and treatment together left him dead. He was sixty-seven years old.

Upon his death, yet another doctor visited and proposed that they revive—indeed, resurrect—the deceased president by rubbing his skin gently to stimulate blood flow and transfusing him with lamb's blood, to replace the blood he had lost and refresh what remained. His family mercifully decided to leave him to his eternal rest.

It may seem to us self-evidently foolhardy to bleed and pummel a person who is already severely ill, but such practices lasted an extraordinarily long time. Bleeding was thought to be beneficial not just for illness but to instill calm. Frederick the Great of Germany was bled before battle just to soothe his jangled nerves. Bleeding bowls were treasured within families and passed on as heirlooms. The importance of bleeding is recalled by the fact that Britain's venerable medical journal The Lancet, founded in 1823, is named for the instrument used for opening veins.

Why did bleeding persist for so long? The answer is that until well into the nineteenth century most doctors approached diseases not as distinct afflictions, each requiring its own treatment, but as generalized imbalances affecting the whole body. They didn't give one drug for headaches and another for, say, ringing in the ears, but rather endeavored to bring the whole body back into a state of equilibrium by purging it of toxins through the administration of cathartics, emetics, and diuretics, or by relieving the victim of a bowl or two of blood. Opening a vein, as one authority put it, "cools and ventilates the blood" and allows it to circulate more freely, "without danger of burning."

The most celebrated bleeder of all, known as the "Prince of Bleeders," was the American Benjamin Rush. Rush trained in Edinburgh and London, where he learned dissecting from the great surgeon and anatomist William Hunter, but his belief that all illnesses arose from a single cause—overheated blood—was largely self-developed during a long career back in Pennsylvania. Rush, it must be said, was a conscientious and learned man. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the most eminent medical practitioner of his day in the New World. But he was a super enthusiast for bleeding. Rush drained up to eighty ounces at a time from his victims and sometimes bled them two or three times in a single day. Part of the problem was that he believed that the human body contains about twice as much blood as it actually does and that one can remove up to 80 percent of that notional amount without ill effect. He was tragically wrong on both counts yet never doubted the rightness of what he did. During a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, he bled hundreds of victims and was convinced that he had saved a great many when in fact all he did was fail to kill them all. "I have observed the most speedy convalescence where the bleeding has been most profuse," he wrote proudly to his wife.

That was the problem with bleeding. If you could tell yourself that those who survived did so because of your efforts while those who died were beyond salvation by the time you reached them, bleeding would always seem a prudent option. Bleeding retained a place in medical treatments right up to the modern age. William Osler, author of The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), the most influential medical textbook of the nineteenth century, spoke in favor of bleeding well into what we would consider the modern era.

As for Rush, in 1813 at the age of sixty-seven he developed a fever. When it didn't improve, he urged his attending physicians to bleed him, and they did. And then he died.

Excerpted from The Body by Bill Bryson. Copyright © 2019 by Bill Bryson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.