During the Middle Ages monks were required to shave the crown of their head, a function commonly performed by itinerant barbers. Also, under ecclesiastic law, monks had to be periodically bled. This was supposedly a symbol of piousness, of devotion to God.
Barbers began to attend to this duty as well. They would travel with a “flag” of a white cloth dipped in blood to indicate that they would attend to anyone who needed to be bled. This early mode of advertisement eventually was transformed into the barber’s pole. And the pole began to symbolize more than haircuts and bleeding. Barbers began to expand their role and became quasi surgeons, specializing in sewing up wounds and extracting teeth. They also dabbled in the whitening of teeth by dabbing them with nitric acid. This did produce an immediate whitening, but destroyed the teeth in the long run by wearing away the protective enamel.
But at least one 16th-century barber surgeon, Ambroise Pare, made an important contribution to medicine. Barbers in those days worked under the guidance of physicians, who thought themselves above menial jobs like cutting and scalding. Why scalding? Because physicians thought that gunpowder was poisonous and therefore gunshot wounds had to be treated with boiling oil to destroy the poison. Unfortunately, if the bullet didn’t kill the victim, the scalding often did.
During the siege of Turin in 1537 Pare ran out of oil and for some reason substituted a cold mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine. To his surprise, the soldiers treated with this mixture fared better than those who had been scalded. And thus ended the brutal practice of pouring hot oil into bullet wounds. The French-trained Pare was a religious sort, and thought he had had help in making his observation. That’s why he introduced the oft-repeated phrase, “I dressed the wound, but God healed him.”
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