V0016791 A surgeon bleeding the arm of a young woman: she is being co
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
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A surgeon bleeding the arm of a young woman: she is being comforted by another woman. Coloured etching by T. Rowlandson (?), 1784.
1784 By: Thomas RowlandsonPublished: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The Wellcome image I chose was from 1784.  It is an engraving by Thomas Rowlandson and it depicts a young woman being bled by a doctor.  There are three figures in the image. Two are female and one is male. The central figure is female and is interacting with both other figured. The make figure is to the central figured right and is holding the central figures arm. The figure on the left is also female and is embracing the central figure and holding a bowl in the cereal figured lap that is collecting blood.

The make figure is presumably the doctor.  He wears a blue coat, yellow vest and white pants and shirt. The central figure wears a pink dress and the left figure wears a yellow dress. There are only nine distinct colors in the image. The colors are black, yellow, pink, white, blue, gray, beige brown and white. All the figures gave the same shade of hair and skin. The yellow of the dress and the best ate identical. Although the image portrays a woman being bled, there is no red. The blood is represented by black lines falling neatly from the central figures arm into the bowl.  The entire scene is very calm and civilized, there is no mess. It portrays blood letting as a simple , relatively painless procedure, reflecting the attitude of the time.