Fluid resuscitation in traumatic haemorrhage.

It is ancient knowledge that stopping haemorrhage is beneficial, and that blood is necessary to sustain life. The world's oldest medical record, a Sumerian clay tablet of about 2150 BC, describes the use of bandages and poultices to stem bleeding. In contrast the Greeks, over a thousand years later, believed that illness resulted from an imbalance of one of four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. If patients were bleeding, physicians might even have bled them further, in order to remove some of the 'excess bad humour', blood.'