Quacks and Leeches

Last year, near Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, archeologists discovered a field blessed with unusually rich soil. When they set the biochemists on it, they found that it was saturated in ancient blood. The site was in the grounds of an old monastery hospital. Even before the American Medical Association rose to power, the old English word for a doctor was a 'leech'. So for generations, the tenderly caring monastery physicians had bled their ailing patients on a daily basis and then taken