Refine Search

Updated View on Bleeding

◆ How can one best stop bleeding from a cut? In the fourth century B.C.E. the Greek philosopher and writer Hippocrates recommended that cold should be applied.

More recently many doctors questioned the advisability of this, having observed that plunging a cut finger into cold water hindered the formation of a blood clot. However, in 1971 researchers at the Mayo Clinic experimented with hemophiliacs. The conclusion was that bleeding stopped most quickly when the area around a wound was chilled.

Interestingly, Hippocrates had recommended that the cold applied should be “not to the parts whence blood flows, but around them.”