The remedies quoted in preceding chapters should be sufficient to give a fair idea of most of the methods of Anglo-Saxon medical practice. But there are certain aspects of their medicine which deserve a closer examination, such as phlebotomy, surgery and gynaecological and related conditions. I shall treat these subjects here and in the following chapters, beginning now with phlebotomy.

The practice of bleeding patients was intimately associated with the doctrine of the four humours, although it arose before that doctrine was promulgated in Greek and Roman medicine. It probably had its inception in the belief that the blood carried the factors of disease through the body, and that ‘bad blood’, blood loaded with these factors, should be removed; this belief was a ruling element of Egyptian practice. The theory of the four humours (bodily fluids) arose out of Hellenic philosophy in an attempt to relate all things to universal laws. Arguments were by analogy, and as there were four seasons, four directions, four winds, four elements and four properties of nature, there were also four humours, so that blood became associated with air and spring which are moist and hot, yellow bile with fire and summer which are hot and dry, black bile with earth and autumn which are dry and cold and phlegm with water and winter which are cold and moist. To this litany of fours were later added the signs of the Zodiac in groups of threes, the four ages of mankind (infancy, adolescence, adulthood and old age) and sometimes, as Christian analogies, the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.