Caleb Shelburne (Department of the History of Science, Harvard University) will present "Leeches for the ‘Sick Man of Europe’: Science and the Environment in the Ottoman Leech Industry, 1830-1870," followed by a discussion.
In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, leech-assisted bloodletting soared in popularity, dramatically increasing the demand for medicinal leeches across Western Europe. As wild leech populations in France, Great Britain, and Spain were overfished and depleted by the 1820s, merchants looked further east, particularly to the Ottoman Empire. Although Ottoman leeches had long been collected for local use, the intensification of the international market transformed these practices, leading to new state regulation, expertise, and ways of imagining and engaging the wetlands where leeches lived. This paper brings together environmental history and the history of science to examine the significance of the Ottoman places where leeches were gathered and stored. It shows how these places mattered historically in advertising, regulation, and natural biology, and how they still matter historiographically, to widen our understanding of medical theory and commodity production. I argue that Ottoman subjects’ knowledge and “Turkey” leeches themselves were vital to the industry but often obscured and distrusted further down the supply chain.