Collection, Smithsonian
Institution; SI photo 61166-C.)]

To distinguish his profession from that of a surgeon, the barber-surgeon
placed a striped pole or a signboard outside his door, from which was
suspended a basin for receiving the blood (Figure 4). Cervantes used this
type of bowl as the "Helmet of Mambrino" in Don Quixote.[32] Special
bowls to catch the blood from a vein were beginning to come into fashion
in the fourteenth century. They were shaped from clay or thin brass and
later were made of pewter or handsomely decorated pottery. Some pewter
bowls were graduated from 2 to 20 ounces by a series of lines incised
around the inside to indicate the number of ounces of fluid when filled to
that level. Ceramic bleeding bowls, which often doubled as shaving bowls,
usually had a semicircular indentation on one side to facilitate slipping
the bowl under the chin. Bowls to be used only for bleeding usually had a
handle on one side. Italian families had a tradition of passing special
glass bleeding vessels from generation to generation. The great variety in
style, color, and size of bleeding and shaving bowls is demonstrated by
the beautiful collection of over 500 pieces of Dr. A. Lawrence Abel of
London and by the collection of the Wellcome Historical Museum, which has
been cataloged in John Crellin's _Medical Ceramics_.[33] These collections
illustrate the stylistic differences between countries and periods.

The barber-surgeons' pole represented the stick gripped by the patient's
hand to promote bleeding from his arm. The white stripe on the pole
corresponded to the tourniquet applied above the vein to be opened in the
arm or leg. Red or blue stripes appeared on early barber poles, but later
poles contained both colors.[34]

The dangers posed by untutored and unskilled bleeders were noted
periodically. In antiquity Galen complained about non-professional
bleeders, and in the Middle Ages, Lanfranc (1315), an outstanding surgeon,
lamented the tendency of surgeons of his time to abandon bloodletting to
barbers and women.[35] Barber-surgeons continued to let blood through the
seventeenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
better educated surgeon, and sometimes even the physician, took charge of
bleeding.

_Bloodletting and the Scientific Revolution_

The discovery of the blood's circulation did not result in immediate
changes in the methods or forms of bloodletting. William Harvey, who
publ