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It is now surprising that the English word leech derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “to heal.” For almost a millennium, the word (at least as written) referred without prejudice to both the doctor and the slug-like animal used by doctors to draw their patients' blood. Not until the late eighteenth century, when new protocols for the extraction by doctors of money and knowledge from their patients became primary, did the word begin to be used in writing to refer to parasitism. This change participates in a dense network of historical changes in technological practices and social relations. Among these, the changing status of leechcraft in medicine (once interchangeable terms) is perhaps less important than the changing status of medical knowledge in capitalism, and the status of writing and professionalism with respect to other social relations.
Medieval medicine named the leech; the emergence of power-knowledge under capitalism (represented by what Foucault called The Birth of the Clinic) gave the leech a particularly bad name: the healer—doctor, lawyer, artist that lets out bad or excess blood and by the catharsis (operation or psychotherapy, trial, text) re-integrates the social body—was coded more pointedly with and against the parasite, interrupting, infecting, disintegrating through the manipulation of gaps and surpluses. Predictably, it was also toward the end of the eighteenth century that the word doctor began to be used in writing as a verb meaning to adulterate.
The crux of epistemic change that can be located in retrospect in the late eighteenth century implicates shifting polarities in semiotic relations as well as their discursive extension. The fault lines that divide the signifieds of single words (leech, doctor) may be the tributaries of great canyons extended in discursive spacetime. “Literary” or “open” texts