Welcome to Medieval TimesThe Medieval Period, AKA the Middle Ages, stretched from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century into the 15th Century, when the Renaissance brought the Age of Discovery.
Perhaps the best description of medieval barbers comes from an inscription on a 16th-century woodcut by German artist Jost Amman, presented in the first person from a man practicing the trade: "I am called everywhere, I can make many healing salves, I can cure new wounds, also fractures and chronic afflictions, Syphilis, Cataract, Gangrene, pull teeth, shave, wash and cut hair, I also like to bleed."
It’s like the weirdest Tinder profile ever, right?
Barbers in the Middle Ages were excellent multi-taskers. It’s true: a lot of surgery in the Middle Ages was done by so-called barber-surgeons, a medieval precursor to the old dude with the combs in the blue water down the street. But they did a whole lot more than just cut people open. The list below features some of the surprising - and often disgusting - things that medieval barbers did besides just cut hair.
Before famous French barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré realized how insane it was, medieval barbers used to pour boiling oil into gunshot wounds in order to cauterize them. At the Battle of Turin in 1536, Paré ran out of oil and was forced to improvise: he instead threw together a salve made with some egg yolks (sure), oil of roses (sounds lovely), and turpentine (paint thinner!). After a sleepless night on the battlefield, Paré awoke to discover that his salve, bizarre as it was, worked a whole lot better than the boiling oil:
I visited my patients, and beyond expectation, I found such as I had dressed with [the salve] only … to have had a good rest, and that their wounds were not inflamed, or tumified; but on the contrary the others that were burnt with the scalding oil were feverish, tormented with much pain, and the parts about their wounds were swollen. When I had many times tried this in diverse others … I thought that neither I nor any other should ever cauterize any wounded with gunshot.
Paré went on to advocate that medical practitioners should treat wounds gently, an innovation that, of course, survives to this day (sans turpentine).
Bloodletting - and the related practice of leeching - are what most people associate with medieval medical practices, so this one seems obvious. But did you know that medieval people thought bloodletting would fix everything? There’s a reason barbers practiced bloodletting more than anything else: there’s nothing it couldn’t make right, as one medieval medical textbook boasted:
[Bloodletting] … clears the mind, strengthens the memory, cleanses the guts, dries up the brain, warms the marrow, sharpens the hearing, curbs tears, promotes digestion, produces a musical voice [!], dispels sleeplessness, drives away anxiety, feeds the blood, rids it of poisonous matter and gives long life … It cures pains, fevers and various sicknesses, and makes the urine clear and clean.
Medieval barbers looking to advertise their sweet bloodletting skills channeled their inner Don Drapers and decided to place bowls of human blood in their shop windows. The blood congealed and got all putrid, because that’s what blood does, so the disgusted people of London pushed for a law banning the nasty displays. In 1307, the law passed, with the following (sarcastic?) wording: “No barbers shall be so bold or so hardy as to put blood in their windows.”
The barbers were a bit miffed because they were also using the displays as a handy way of “recycling” unwanted blood. What were they supposed to do with it now? Lawmakers advised them to throw it into the river Thames instead, because this was 1307. What’s the worst thing that could happen?
How did barbers advertise after The Great Blood Bowl Ban of 1307? Some historians think this is when the practice of wrapping a bloody cloth around a pole outside the shop started, a grisly precursor to the wholesome image of a modern-day barber pole.
It’s a fact that human urine has its uses as a cleansing agent, even if that fact makes most humans queasy these days. The Romans knew it; in fact, they even recycled their urine to help get their togas cleaner (the ammonia does wonders). Barbers in the Middle Ages knew it, too, and even used stale pee - known as lotium - as a shampoo for their clients. (No word on whether or not you could bring you own, locally-sourced pee from home.)
A document from 1499 detailing the affairs of “The Gild of Barbers” of Oxford mentions “ale-baisters,” an obscure term that initially stumped the editors of the tome Records of Mediæval Oxford (1912). Research revealed that the lowest class of medieval barbers couldn’t afford a plentiful supply of shaving soap, so they sometimes turned to “froth of ale” for “basting” their patients' faces instead. That’s right: beer foam as shaving foam. Why hasn’t Axe or Old Spice picked up on this idea? Beer foam in an aerosol can - it’s genius.
This brings new meaning to the term “operating theater." Instead of university-educated physicians, lowly barbers in the Middle Ages were tasked with removing kidney stones, and they often did it with an audience watching. Traveling from town to town with a special “lithotomy” table in tow, talented barbers would perform the simple procedure in just a few minutes, in public, in order to help advertise their services. Some “barbers” were just showmen, looking to make a quick buck. These so-called “stonecutters” were heavily fined if their “procedure” didn’t go according to plan.
