Words: 9528

Pages: 44

Footnotes: 92

Books: 18

Articles: 19

Discrete primary sources: 30

Title: “The Fashionable Custom of Despising the Lancet”: Medical Discourse and the Decline of Therapeutic Bloodletting in Nineteenth-Century Britain



Believe me, no one feels that way more than I do.

I have not died, though I feel like I’ve suffered many little deaths. I must have written well over 10,000 words by now. As it stands, Thesis Draft 3.0 is at about 6,000 words. I no longer fear the lower-limit word-count.

I fear a lot of other things. I won’t get into them here, because it is 1AM at this part of the world, and I have a busy night and a busy Thursday entire in front of me.

I promised my adviser I’d have a ‘completed’ thesis in his inbox by tonight, so he has a chance to read it and give feedback to me in time for me to correct any major disasters before the due date on April 6th (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

More later. I’m looking forward to doing a Lessons My Undergraduate Thesis Taught Me post after this is all said and done…

Now this is a story all about how

Therapeutics got flipped, turned upside down

So if you’ll just take a minute and sit right there

Roll up your sleeve and let your vein take some air

In old Galen’s time, born and raised,

Phlebotomy was a theory that was sweepin’ all ways.

Curing all afflictions, relaxing all cool and reducing inflamation thanks to Hippocratic rules,

When a couple of guys, they were up to no good,

Started making trouble for physicianhood.

The Edinburgh fight got doctors all scared,

They said, “phlebotomy does  nothing, we’re so unprepared!”

Doc Louis tested for a theory but it didn’t come near,

But the Brits thought he was fresh and he got Doc Hall to cock an ear

If anything one  could say that phlebotomy was dying

But you know, naw, forget it, them docs they was tryin’!

We. Pull. Up to eighteen ninety-seven or eight

When they yelled to their lancets, “yo homes, try you later!”

They looked at their kingdom, they were finally free

To act on the body without old phlebotomy.

But I think I just mixed up the grout.

I’ve gone about this the wrong way. Being paranoid about hitting word count is hogwash. I am a seasoned last-second writer, and with the good grades that hasty, wine-fueled night-before method has gotten me, I don’t know why I decided to try and plod things out so gamely. With the blinders of “good work ethic” firmly attached, I managed to walk myself and my cart right into a ditch. I can bung out 3,000 words in a night easily – so that might make pretty much scrapping 80% of the clumsy prose I’ve taken down so far a more palatable move.

The reason?

After glutting myself on Korean convenience store food tonight, I had an epiphany which led to the construction of a road map. *GASP* You mean…I actually plotted the course my thesis should take? Why I didn’t do this before I do not know, save for the slight chance that I hadn’t yet assimilated enough of my readings to feel comfortable routing myself in such a way. It hadn’t all “come together,” and far from being a waste of time, the writing process up to this point was a vital part of that, I think. If you’ve watched an artist draw, you’ve probably seen them doodle a bit before setting in to make the good line art. These last 22 days were the critical textual doodles I needed to wrap my head around everything I’d read and need to do.

So now I have an outline. A list, rather, of my thesis ‘Parts’ and a point-by-point summary of what I need to say in each to make my argument convincing and to ensure overall flow. At last, I think I see how it all fits. I’m still going to make that trip to the Theses Of Ages Past on Monday, because I have a suspicion yet I may get dinged for not being ‘critical’ or ‘focused’ enough and I’d like to see how much pathfinding and how much explaining some of the other theses did in their prose.

But in general, I’m going to sleep well on this one. My new working title? “The Final Century of Bloodletting: Lowering the Lancet in Nineteenth Century Britain.”

Early rise, work tomorrow, then I’m back in the saddle.

YEEHAW.

And to tempt myself a little more and get the vim n’ vinegar in my blood, I’ve concocted a bribe for myself. If I finish this and receive at least an A on it (not an A-, mind you, but an A), I could countenance commemorating the occasion with a tattoo. Maybe the triple spiral of a leechbite, or a constellation of them?

Hmmm…

How energized and optimistic I seemed, 22 days ago.

I have no words with which to express my disdain for this project. The way I’m going about it, my absence of certitude, my brain’s buttery softness as regards anything remotely approximating a ‘thesis.’

On Monday, I’m going to read some of the submissions from last year. This might lead me to a new burst of confidence, or academic suicide. Stay tuned.

3242 / 10000 words. 32% done!

10 minutes later, after writing down the plot for a spy thriller featuring a sleeper agent nestled in Yale for 20+ years…

Thinking about my thesis before going to bed last night (rather, this morning, as I did so at 1AM) must have been beneficial to the old brainpan, as I awoke with a burst of insight:

1. A new organizational scheme vastly improved over my present working model

2. A new nuance to my argument resulting from a new factor to investigate and consider

And then, when I sat down at the laptop with some sugary, milky tea, I noticed the words just flowing out of me like the blood from the arms of those phlebotomized – precisely those I’m writing about.

A note on this wordcount business, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned before…

It’s inaccurate. Footnotes probably buff it to some degree, but more importantly, it doesn’t account for the great swaths of text I am likely to delete when writing. False starts, poorly articulated segues, etc.; they all fall before my Delete key. Alas that there is no EffortCount, which displays the more vital statistics of this ongoing project.

And the ‘% Done!’? Hardly. If only an essay stopped when you reached word count. Let’s not forget that this is a first draft only…

2407 / 10000 words. 24% done!

But I think today’s thesis-ing fell into a middle ground between the two. My excitement about the new direction I’m going in may have been, in part, due to the adrenaline shot out by an overtaxed cardiovascular system, but I think there’s some genuine things to celebrate as well.

For instance, doing some research on this essay led me to come up with a viable topic for my essay required for French cultural history, which is a good thing as I have to have a prospectus prepared for that soon.

I learned a lot today.

I’m about 1200 words behind this week’s goal, but I’m confident with some juicy butt-in-seat time I can make up for that in a single session with my track laid down in front of me.

Like the steamtrain community in China Mieville’s Iron Council demonstrates, when you’re moving along tracks you’re laying yourself, it can be slow going, but I’m still confident I’ll reach my destination in one piece.

2132 / 10000 words. 21% done!

After successfully bribing myself and enjoying 2 or 3 Ah Caramel!s, I guess I got tired of them. And when you permit yourself to have about a pastry a day as a pick-me-up before/during/after work and/or class, the gravity of a single Ah Caramel! is about as strong as Deimos’.

Failing to earn that Groucho Marx martini last week has me fired up with aggravated momentum. Considering I’ve written about zilch this entire week, that leaves tomorrow to meet deadline. (Saturday evenings are, I’ve decided, when my “week” ends.) That’s about 2,000 words, preferably 3,000 tomorrow.

Do I have confidence? Tentatively. If you’re wondering how there can be such a thing as tentative confidence, I will tell you that I embody it. I have two ideas for sections; an analysis of phlebotomy in popular images, and finally getting started on the historiography. I might also begin to discuss the Big Names in the phlebotomy debate. I tremble to think that I haven’t a more brilliant thesis concept at this stage of the game (hence the tentativeness), but in past experience my Eureka moment comes in the 11th hour.

I want that Groucho Marx martini. I want this essay to be good.

I WANT TO ROCK HISTORY’S WORLD.

I’m still sitting at a shoddy 13%, and feeling more than ever that I don’t have my angle down, don’t know what I’m saying, or if I can say it right. And for the next three days, I’m going to be busy as a bee with other school and life things.

This means I’m going to have to write about 2,000 words in one day. Certainly do-able, but I don’t look forward to it, especially as I’m still researching. I’ll be camped out in the computer lab on campus, likely, as I like their PC monitor screens and the productive atmosphere more than my ‘office’ at home. The down-side is being unable to snack. Alas!

I’m sitting here in 2010, able to pay my tuition and finally pay off my VISA. This is why I worked two jobs from November onward, to be fiscally responsible. But on the other hand, I have barely the osteoperosis-riddled skeleton of a project I’ve technically had four months to work on already.

School is not compatible with life, my friends. Our heroine is discouraged.

I have 30 days left to do this thesis, and 8689 words left to write if I want to hit 10,000 words.  I have been a weak, feeble, snack-cake stealing and furtive Tumblr-looking student. So, some new math needs to be done…

New Daily Count: Minimum 290 words. (+27 to original goal.)

New Weekly Count: 2030.  (+179 to original goal.)

I did not earn my Groucho Marx martini this week. The chief fire arrow in the wings of my Da Vinci machine has been the need to continue researching simultaneously with the writing; I’m even still accumulating source materials. There are also the little matters of two other courses and two jobs, which make thesis-making a far more segmented project strewn across time than I would have liked, but c’est la vie.

My chief frustration at present is my geographic divorce from so many of the sources I need. They’re all sitting in archives in Britain. I cannot get to them, and I cannot receive them through interlibrary loan as I am but a lowly undergraduate. So Marshall Hall’s Observations on Blood-letting Founded on Researches on the Morbid and Curative Effects of Loss of Blood, published in 1830 and probably chok-full of juicy support for my thesis, remains out of my grasp. I struggle, too, with the idea of trying to express this inaccessability in the essay itself which makes my readers aware I am aware of said source,  but which admits the impossibility of my reading it in a way which disguises my extreme childish frustration.

Though the ‘textual tantrum’ does have a fairly strong history in the literature of historians…

1311 / 10000 words. 13% done!