The Original “Dr. Sangrado”
Thousands may have enjoyed the humour of Gil Blas without suspecting that the genius of Dr. Sangrado had any living prototype. Yet such was Botal, who revolutionized the practice of medicine by a freedom of bleeding that was quite unprecedented. He bled largely and repeatedly, both young and old, male and female, in all diseases, whether low in type or acute. “The young he bled freely, on account of the rapid reproduction of blood in youth; the old, because he saw in the practice a conduciveness to rejuvenescence. He bled freely in low and wasting diseases, even of a malignant nature, because a richer and better blood was formed; in dysentery, because he recognised in it an affinity to inflammation of the lungs, in which all physicians bled; in all forms of flatulency, because of its power to relieve obstructions; in short, he had a reason for bleeding in every special distemper, and when reproached for the indiscriminate routine of practice, he argued that the more water you draw from a well the purer and better is that which filters in. From him originated the system of bleeding in pregnancy, which is continued to this day.” Botal was a man of happy despatch, like Van Helmont, under whose hands, as his biographer relates, “the sick never languished long, being always killed or cured in three days.” Botal’s patients were probably more often killed than cured; but they did not die in vain, for his practice set medical men observing and thinking, so that good came of it in the end—a great consolation for his victims, could they have foreseen it.—Spectator newspaper.