I like to go on canoe trips in the summer and one of the hazards of canoe tripping is that sometimes lakes have leeches.

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They adhere themselves to your skin and start sucking on your blood.

They don’t actually do much damage but the concept is pretty unappealing.

Kids love animals but is it possible for little girls to love leeches?

Historically and even today leeches are used in medicine. They have the ability to keep blood flowing which can be useful in tissues that doctors are trying to help heal. So perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that once upon a time doctors weren’t called doctors, but instead they were called leeches.

Back around the year 900 the Venerable Bede first recorded the word leech in English and at that time he was talking about medical practitioners, not slimy sucking water worms.

Coincidentally The Oxford English Dictionary also dates the first reference to leeches as blood suckers to about the same year 900 but this time in a gloss; that is, in a short note explaining in English what a word in Latin document means.

Doctors were called leeches based on a Germanic root that meant “to heal.”

This root in turn is thought to go back to and Indo-European root leg that meant “to speak.”

Here I’m imagining a connection based on the doctor speaking to you about what you have to do to heal yourself.

The “to speak” meaning went even further back to a meaning of “gather.”

Here I suppose the knowledge has been gathered by the physician.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable confidently declares that it is because doctors used leeches extensively to heal people that leeches started to be called by what people called the doctors.

The Oxford English Dictionary says this is a plausible theory but that the early spelling forms of the animal leech were different enough from the physician leech to make them think it might have been an independent word.

The American Heritage Dictionary points to a different Indo-European root for the sucking kind of leech. In this case leig which meant to bind.

The waters get murky back that far in history.

Murky waters are where leeches like to live and one day when on a canoe trip we noticed some of the little suckers happily ensconced between my daughter’s toes.

Luckily there were no tears from my daughter.

It isn’t recommended to just rip the things off, they leave their mouth parts behind. Better, so it is said, to sprinkle salt on them or touch them with a hot ember until the disengage and fall off.

We went for the salt option.

No tears I should say until I was ready to pitch the little leech body into the campfire. Then she let loose.

We simply had to return the dear little creature to the lake where it liked to live.