ArticleMedical history2023
'Pearls' of the nineteenth-century: from therapeutic actors to global commodities medicinal leeches in the Ottoman Empire.
Article in Medical history, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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2 citing papers in PubMed, 5 citations in OpenAlex.
- Comparative genomics suggests extensive antithrombotic gene expansion in Haemadipsa yanyuanensis.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- Who are leeches? Exploring malleability in human-leech relations through ethnographies from Dagestan and Turkey.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2025Article
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1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Nineteenth-century physicians increasingly favoured leeching - the placing of a live leech onto a patient's skin to stimulate or limit blood flow - as a cure for numerous ailments. As conviction in their therapeutic properties spread, leech therapy dominated European medicine; France imported over fifty million leeches in one year. Demand soon outpaced supply, spawning a lucrative global trade. Over-collection and farming eventually destroyed leech habitats, wreaked environmental havoc and forced European merchants to seek new supply sources. Vast colonies of leeches were found to inhabit the immense wetlands of the Ottoman Empire, which soon became a major exporter of medicinal leeches. Following the Treaty of Balta Liman (1838), the Ottoman state moved to exert control over the lucrative trade, imposing a tax on leech gathering and contracting with tax-farmers (
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