Matt Kaplan

And to his mind, that made no sense because if you're trying to get rid of the bad blood –

You should apply leeches early and that will help, but why were so many of them dying if they had the leeches applied early as opposed to late?

And so that was the first hammer blow to old methodologies.

And he did the extraordinary thing of actually recording his data sets.

And he was not alone.

There were folks in Hungary and Vienna and also in Massachusetts who were starting to take notes and record the outcomes of patients.

And that was really the application of Galileo's scientific method, but in medicine.

And it had taken hundreds of years to get there.

And these people who recorded these notes and said, hey, I don't think this is helping, did not do terribly well.

The rest of the populace did not like what they had to say.

Oh, absolutely.

So, okay, we could talk about bleeding for starters, right?

So Pierre-Alexandre Louis was running this experiment and saying, look, I applied leeches on day one, and it was not good.

And he published those results, and he was forgotten.

People did not take kindly to the notion that leeches weren't helping.

And there was a sizable industry.

Industry?

Leech farms.

You know.

Oh, my God.