For centuries the person who cut your hair also pulled teeth, applied leeches, and amputated limbs. This episode explains how that happened. Medieval university physicians considered touching blood beneath them, while monasteries needed resident barbers to maintain the monks’ tonsures. When monks fell ill, humoral theory called for draining excess blood, and the barber with the razor took on bloodletting, scarification, lancing abscesses, and tooth extraction. By around 1000 AD these tradesmen appear in records as barber surgeons, and by 1254 the Italian physician Bruno da Longobucco was complaining about them.

Firearms and artillery in the 16th century made barber surgeons the trauma specialists of European battlefields, and French translations of surgical texts in the 1540s let them read anatomy for the first time. In Paris, surgeons of the long robe from the College of Saint Côme looked down on barbers of the short robe. Italy’s universities trained physicians in surgery, Florence passed statutes in 1349 to subordinate barbers, and in London barbers and surgeons merged in 1540, split in 1745, and became the Royal College of Surgeons in 1800.

• Michel de Montaigne’s argument that surgery was more reliable than internal medicine
• Sweden under Gustav Vasa assigning one barber surgeon to every company of 400 to 500 men
• The red and white barber pole as a marker of blood and bandages
• Why surgeons in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa use Mr. or Ms. instead of doctor
• Martín de Porres, Magdalena Bendzisławska, and Johanna Hedén among the trade’s trailblazers