For:

It would be difficult to determine whether greater injury has risen in the practice of physic, from undue, or from inefficient bloodletting. To neglect the full use of - this most important of our remedies, when it is required, or to institute it when it is not so, is equally to endanger the safety of the patient.

Bloodletting is not only the most powerful and important, but the most generally used, of all our remedies. Scarcely a case of acute, or indeed of chronic disease, occurs in which it does not become necessary to consider the propriety of having recourse to the lancet, or to estimate the effects of bloodletting already instituted.

Against:

The practice of bleeding for the purpose of curing disease, I consider most unnatural and injurious. Nature never furnished the body with more blood than...