A History of Barbering, Part One: The Barber-Surgeons

This is part one of our series on the history of barbering.

The barbershop has been around far longer than most people think, and for most of that history your barber did a lot more than cut your hair.

Older than you'd guess

Barbering goes back thousands of years. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, barbers were respected members of the community, and a clean shave and a sharp haircut said something about a man's standing. But the version of the trade that shaped the modern shop really took form in medieval Europe, and it took a strange turn to get there.

When the church stepped back

In 1163, Pope Alexander III barred clergy from performing bloodletting and minor surgery. Monks had been doing a fair amount of that work, and once they were out, somebody still had to do it. Barbers were the obvious choice. They already had the steady hands, the sharp blades, and a shop people visited regularly.

So they took it on. For centuries afterward, the "barber-surgeon" did far more than grooming. He pulled teeth, set broken bones, treated wounds, lanced boils, performed bloodletting, and in the worst cases handled amputations, all of it alongside the haircut and the shave. If you needed something cut, your barber was your man, for better or worse.

The trades split

Barber-surgeons were a fixture across Europe for hundreds of years. In England they were organized into a single guild, the Company of Barber-Surgeons, formed in 1540. Over time, as surgery grew into a trained and respected profession of its own, the two trades began to drift apart. In 1745 the surgeons formally broke away to form their own company, and the barbers kept the chair, the razor, and the shave.

What carried over

What's worth noticing is how much of the craft survived that split. The straight razor, the hot towel, the careful hand, the idea that a man's grooming is worth slowing down for and getting right. That lineage runs straight to the chair you sit in today.

We'll happily leave the bloodletting in the past and stick to haircuts and shaves. But we like knowing the trade has this long, slightly bloody history behind it. Next up: why the barber pole is red, white, and blue.

Further reading: HISTORY and the Wikipedia entry on the barber's pole.