The method of treatment by medical leech (hirudotherapy) is one of the most ancient examples of the application of the natural healing forces in medical activities. Its clinical efficiency is confirmed by more than 2.5 thousand years of successful use at different times all over the world. The great doctors: Suśruta (India), Themison of Laodassea and Soranus of Ephesus (Ancient Greece), Rhazes and Avicenna (Persia), Arnold of Villanova (Italy), Ambroise Paré and Victor Broussais (France), J.F.Dieffenbach and H.Bottenberg (Germany), Y.M.Mudrov and G.A.Zakhar’in, and many others turned to this practice.
For the last 150 years contemporary medicine has gradually almost lost hirudotherapy as a meansl of treatment. Today, Russia remains the only country in the world to use widely therapeutic properties of medicinal leeches. The violent expansion of pharmaceutical business has seized all the developed countries for the last century. Despite this hirudotherapy traditions and knowledge have been preserved in Russia. The skills gained for many centures are alive here. In our days it is very important to rethink this experience, to combine it with the fundamental approaches of scientific medicine; and to pass it over to the new generation of medical doctors. The medical community based on a reasonable compromise between contemporary technologies and abilities of Nature.