This essay considers understandings and representations of blood and bloodletting in a range of eighteenth-century medical and literary texts. Reflecting a historical moment of complex and uneven transition, these texts present models of blood that are variously orthodox, idiosyncratic, and imaginative. Representations of bloodletting, in particular, show doctors and laypeople, including women, contesting, welcoming, and orchestrating the therapy, which could both injure and soothe. Taken together, the texts this essay explores reinforce, refute, and enlarge humoral, mechanist, rational–empirical, vitalist, and other master paradigms, commonly conceiving body, mind, spirit, and earth as intricately connected and illustrating how medical ideas in this period were formed not merely through the consensus of an elite group of male authorities but also through the co-existence of a range of variable, oftentimes conflicting, theories; through dissent and debate; through the voices of non-experts; and through a reliance on the creative imagination.

中文翻译：

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“紫色洪水的曲折”：18 世纪文学和医学中的鲜血与放血

这篇文章考虑了 18 世纪一系列医学和文学文本中对血液和放血的理解和表述。这些文本反映了一个复杂且不平衡的过渡时期的历史时刻，呈现了各种正统、奇异和富有想象力的血液模型。尤其是放血的表现，显示医生和外行人，包括妇女，竞争、欢迎和协调治疗，这既可以伤害也可以抚慰。总而言之，本文探讨的文本强化、反驳和扩大了体液论、机械论、理性-经验论、活力论和其他主要范式，它们通常构想身体、思想、精神、和地球错综复杂地联系在一起，说明了这一时期的医学思想是如何形成的，不仅是通过男性权威精英群体的共识，而且是通过一系列可变的、经常相互冲突的理论的共存；通过异议和辩论；通过非专家的声音；并通过对创造性想象力的依赖。