Formerly used as a treatment to reduce excess blood (one of the four humors of medieval medicine)

Usage examples of bloodletting.

When, in the aftermath of the yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1797, Rush had been publicly attacked for his bloodletting treatment, both by Philadelphia physicians and the press, and his practice dwindled to the point that he could barely survive, Adams, who was then President and struggling with troubles of his own, had appointed him treasurer of the United States Mint.

The Aedile had dismissed all of these allegations as fantasies, but then a boy had died after bloodletting, and the parents, mid-caste chandlers, had lodged a formal protest.

If some major battlefield bloodletting did take place, then no mediation could proceed as the popular demand for vengeance rose, but in time neutral Kentucky, as the only state that could treat with both powers evenhandedly, might provide the bridge to bring the parties together.

Rawlins leaped three times backward with his shoulders hunched and his arms outflung like a man refereeing his own bloodletting.

British Army has prevented periodic outbursts of bloodletting and will again.

Flynn kept his camera rocketing back and forth, getting as much coverage of the bloodletting as he could.

He led them away from the crowd, past another wooden pole, bleached by the elements and sculpted by human hands and driven into the ground at the very center of the clearing, the axle upon which prisoners of war were once tied and sacrificed in an hours-long ritual of systematic bloodletting because without blood, the visible flow of life nutrients, the things of this world would vanish out of time.

For the benefit of observers, of whom there are many, he kneels a moment, appearing to repeat his sacred Oath, before rising to put on, very carefully, piece by razor-keen piece, his bloodletting suit, till all at last is ready.

Tristan looked back down to see that Failee had completed the bloodletting of the four other sorceresses and was now performing the same ritual on herself.

He comes a from a long line of bloodletting lords, who ruled with the sword-blade and despised any show of compassion, dismissing it as frailty.

I had ordered post-horses to continue our journey, and Daturi of his own authority sent them back and went for a doctor, who pronounced me to be in danger of an apoplectic fit and ordered a copious bloodletting, which restored my calm.

Those black moods usually ended by escalating into a towering rage and plans for bloodlettings that were bigger and more spectacular than any that had gone before.

Among the German farmers of Lancaster, for example, are scores, perhaps hundreds, of truly, literally Good People, escap'd from a Hell we in our small tended Quotidian may but try to imagine, entire Villages put to Flame, and Tortures worse than Inquisitorial, disembowelments, bloodlettings, a world without Innocence, yet, escap'd here, into Innocence reborn, something deeper and more intricate, they call it "a new Life in Christ," it is their way of explaining it.

The boys in my junior high school went through a siege of drawing machines like that: hot rods and racing cars, tanks, torture devices, guns, knives, and bloodlettings of all kinds.

In the view of the majority, the calm that has descended upon our Continent must be ascribed partly to the general prostration following the bloodlettings of the terrible wars, but far more to the fact that the Occident has ceased to be the focal point of world history and the arena in which claims to hegemony are fought out.