wildehacked:

This is an artificial leech. 

They were used to bleed patients, back when virtually every illness–mental and physical–was treated with bloodletting, purging, and blistering. It punctures the skin at many points and draws the blood like a syringe, so the doctors could measure how much blood they were taking. It was considered more scientific and more humane than a knife, a blood stick, or a real leech, which were also in use. They were used at Bethlehem Royal Hospital in the 1700s. They were, of course, medically useless, although no one knew that at the time.

There are pink starbursts on the inside of Thomas’s elbows. The scars trail up the vulnerable skin of his inner arms in perfectly even rows. 

“You weren’t sick,” James grinds out, fingers digging into that tender skin. 

Thomas looks utterly vacant for a moment, his breath slow and steady. “They believed they were helping me,” he says after a while.