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It's a cold morning in 15th century France - Coggle Diagram
It's a cold morning in 15th century France
and you off to the barber for a shave and a hair cut. you hear the familiar sound of singing inside and eye a bowl of blood in the window
Both chairs are taken. You grab a cup of male and examine the erray of teeth strung from the walls.
Suddenly, a scream. The barber's apprentice wipes pus from the boil he's just lanced. By the other chải, the barber fixes a pare of plires over a blackned
rotting tooth. For centuries, babers in western and northern Europ didn't just cut hair, they also performed a range of surgerirs
from tooth extraction to stiches, and even amputation. There were two main factors that led to barbers filling this position
Before this, these surgical procedures were mostly perfromed by monks. The clergymen were required by the Catholic Church to sport a very specific haircut
called tonsures, and to remove all facial hair, so the monasteries generally had at least pne barber
Given their proximity and ability to work with sharp blades, these barbers often assisted in surgeries. And in 1215
the church issued an edict banning monks from any act that purposefully spilled blood. At the same time, universities with medical schools were opening across Europe
However, these doctors saw themselves as academic scholars who would never dirty their hands by touching blood or wielding knives
Medicine and surgery became two separate, yet complementary, disciplines-like geometry and carpentry. So operations were left in the
hands and shears of baber-surgeons rather than studying anatomy in textbooks, baber-surgeons trained through extended apprenticeships
TThey often combined knowledge of anatomy with astrology, taking both the patient's symptoms and corresponding astrological events-such as lunar phrases
like many people of the time, they regarged the position of the sun, moon, and stars to be highlysignificant. They also memorized poems to commit information
to memory-such as one identifyinf where on the body bloodletting should be formed. For headaches, the temples, and for hemorhoids the back of the legs
Barber-surgeons certainly kept busy. From around 1300 CE, unpredictable weather across the North Atlantic caused by what is now called the Little Ice Age
Led to regular famines. People often had to choose between starvation or eating rye flour that was contaminated with the fungus ergot. This led to widespread
illnesses, which in extreme cases caused gangrene, or the rotting of body tissue. When garge set in, the only hope of saving a patient was through amputation
Armires needed both hair-dressing and wound care and barber-surgeonc contributed important knowledge to the medical establishment
By the 18th century, medical knowledge started advancing rapidly. new surgical techiniques emerged for closing wounds
controlling blood loss, and perfroming complex procedures, like removing cancerous tissue. Surgery became more specialized-and under pressure
from the medical establishment - barbers and surgeons and dentists entered the ranks of university - trained medical practitioners while barbers remain crops
their trade through apprenticeship. However, the legacy of the barber-surgeon can still be seen today, perhaps most prominently in the red and white stripes on the barber pole