The Spring Lancet I'm not normally one to plume myself on my possessions, because, well, I possess little that would arouse anyone's envy. But I own one of these, and I bet you don't. Actually I own it only through the spouse, who inherited it from his parents, it having come down from the great-great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War. (I may have left off a great there.) Nifty little device, no? Do you know what it is? We didn't, though we'd puzzled over it for quite some time. Just the other day I was considering putting a picture of it here, to ask readers if they knew its purpose. But a search showed the answer was on the web all the time. We had guessed that it might be used for opening a vein, and the spouse's felicitious choice of "spring lancet" for a Google search buried the mystery. (It's Figure 16 on this "Bloodletting Antiques" page.) Note the class of instrument directly below: "the Scarificator". As the main page of this site says, "and be thankful you live in today's medical world..."
Posted by Moira Breen at May 24, 2002 04:42 PM