The Forest Republican. [volume] (Tionesta, Pa.) 1869-1952, 1885-08-05
THE TRADE In LEECHES.
A PECULIAR INDUSTRY WHICH
STILL FLoURTsHHs.

Gathering LeecIes for the London
Market - How they nre Caught
and Kept-AppIvlng Lceches.
OF the two firms in London--and there
are only two--to whom the foreign
leeches are consigned from Hamburg,
one practices as a dental surgeon and the
other sells pipes, tobacco, and other tri-
fles. Both are of sufficient standing to
recall the great times of indiscfiminate
blood letting, when, whether the patient
suffered from a black eye, headache,
liver or a heart he lost couple of
ounces of blood and was declared to be
better. Now scarcely one is used where
century ago hundred fourished, and
the sixpenny leeoh of even so recent a
date as 1860 has fallen to something less
than half-pennY at wholesale price. No
completer proof of the popularity of the
leech with the early practitioner can be
afforded than by the fact that the verb
''to leech" means to treat with medicine
and to bleed, while the doctor himself,
even so late as the days OF Shakespeare,
borrowed the name OF his favorite in
strument of healing. The slender, meagre,
hungry leech comes from Turkey, within
radius of fifty miles of Constantine
pie, and from Buda-Pesth, where the
country people bring them in. like water
cress, by thousands from the bitches,
and sell them to the dealers. They are
found there in all bitches and ponds,
and wherever there is pure running water,
weeds for shelter and muddy banks and
bottoms. They are, as a rule netted in
nets prepared with bait, though we are
also informed that it is not rare for the
hardy peasant to walk barelegged
through the water and strip them off as
fast as they can adhere to the calf.
However they are caught-by plain,
honest fishing or by human artifce-from
Buda-Pesth, without distinction of age
or size, they travel to Hamburg, where
they lie in vast pools or reservoirs until
the time for their selection arrives. In
these reservoirs they lie generally for a
year, and during all that time, if they
are properly cared for, they should re-
ceive no food, or rather no more than
they can find for themselves in the water.
But this is a rule that is not always OBJ
served az it should be, for there are many
merchants who give them blood, and
some liver, and some, so that all tastes
may be satisfied, the entire body of a
horse thrown among them, with the re-
suit that on arrival in this country their
appetites arc fatigued, and they are
found to need certain stimulants to per-
formance. From Hamburg, when their
time of probation is over, they are i'm
ported here direct in bags and
boxes, and at the back of the surgery in
Pentonville, or among the pipes and to-
bacco of Houndsditch they lie in shallow
earthen vessels tightly covered with
gauze or liuen, the halting stage on the
way to the wholesale druggist and the
hospital. With the importer they rarely
tarry for more than four or five days,
but are sent out almost as fast as they
come in in small wooden boxes similar
to those used by fruiterers for honey
comb. From the wholesale druggist
they pass again 20 the chemist and apothe-
cary, and when the perils of travel and
the variations of climate they go through
are considered, the intending purchaser
must not be surprised if he finds himself
asked a sixpence for an animal that cost
the first dealer a shilling for couple of
hundred. Many die on the voyage, and
many in the short time they remain with
selected leech will stand an extreme of
heat or cold, many of the fiye-and-twen-
ties and tifties ordered by the chemist,
carefully treated as they are, do not live
to fulfill what seems to be the sole reason
of their existance-that of drawing blood.
The leech should never properly be APP
piled more than once, and can be applied
anywhere 1t fills in about quarter of
an hour, and will absorb altogether from
forty to eighty-tve grains of blood, or
in all about half an ounce. There is an
ingenious instrument known as the
artificial leech. one occasionally
used, but now scarcely ever met
with. 1t consists of a small, sharp steel
cylinder worked by spring, with which
q circular incision is made, and with an
interior glass cylinder capable OF being
exhausted by a piston worked by a
screw. 1t Is not good instrument, and
is, as we say, not used now. There is a
specimen to be seen in the museum of
/ the college of surgeons among the sur
gical instrument SERIES" In England
there is less powerful species common
/ ly found, though now never used. 1t is
| known as the horse leech, from its hab
! its of attacking the membranes lining
the mouth and nOstrils of animals drink
ing at the pools it haunts. 1t is in its
way venomous, and, when applied to
the human subject, inflammation, leading
to erysipelas, has been known to follow
! its bite. There must be something in
our waters unfayorable to the growth
and culture OF the parasite, for not only
is the indigenous leech useless and in
deed harmful, but the foreign specimens
which efforts have been made to accli-
matize have never come to any good.
Thirty years ago prominent English
firm projected and founded a farm at
Norwood for the breeding and cultiva-
tion of the Turkish and Hungarian leech,
but, either from ignorance of treatment
OF changefuness of climate, they all
sickened and died, and the scheme col
/ laDsed. .-C C0rHhiN