The Scarificator,So what do you think this device was used for? Believe me it is as horrible as its

The Scarificator,So what do you think this device was used for? Believe me it is as horrible as its name suggests.Up until the late 19th century people believed that bad health was caused by an imbalance of the bodily humors (fluids).  A healthy person had a balance between blood, bile, and phlegm.  Illness was believed to result when any of these humors became imbalanced.  To restore balance, physicians often would bleed the patient to drain out excess blood. For instance, when George Washington was ill with a throat infection, he was drained of 9 pints of blood over a 24 hour period. He died by the way.The problem was that it was fairly nasty business for the patient to slowly have a vein cut open with a scalpel.  To solve this problem the Scarificator was invented.  Popular around the late 18th and early 19th century, the Scarificator was a metal device containing two sets of razors that were spring loaded.  The device was wound up or cocked, and when triggered would spring the razors forward cutting the flesh it was situated on, usually the arm.  The Scarificator was a great step forward in bloodletting technology, while painful it was much faster and more efficient than a man with a scalpel.By the later 19 century bloodletting was relegated to quackery as modern science took over the field of medicine.  -- source link

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