During the bubonic plague, infected people would have painfully swollen lymph nodes bursting through their skin. However, people with hemochromatosis would have iron-starved macrophages that could resist the bubonic plague, and therefore be more likely to survive and reproduce. The gene for hemochromatosis would then be selected for and carried forward in future populations.
The long held tradition of bloodletting to fight disease may therefore have had a good basis in fact after all. Starving infectious bacteria of iron by reducing the amount of blood is the surprising benefit that might explain why people believed in the value of bloodletting for so long. There might have been enough situations when bloodletting resulted in recovery to explain why the belief in the procedure persisted for such a long time.
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