Wigs and Ear Wax

What do upholsterers have in common with surgeons? Why are goldsmiths affiliated to barbers? At first sight, these questions might suggest something to do with technology. The first pair cut and sew; the latter heat elements for their work and use cutting implements. But the answer, as Sandra Cavallo demonstrates in her remarkable study of barber-surgeons in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Turin, lies not in what these artisans do, but in who they are and how they are related by marriage and through extended family links. It lies above all in their privileged access to the bodies of their clients and to the private rooms of the elite. Studying barbers means investigating these different occupations and their intersections and in Cavallo's hands the history of medicine becomes the history of family and inheritance. This is unusual. Most work on barbers and barber-surgeons has tended to focus on their competitive relationships either with medical professionals such as doctors, or with alternative practitioners such as the tooth-drawers who attracted large crowds when pulling teeth in public.1 Here, the ‘medical’ was differentiated from the ‘fashionable’. Blood-letting, caring for wounds and setting fractures were seen as the most important aspect of the barber-surgeon's work while their other activities such as shaving were marginalized; this means that the growing scholarship produced by literary scholars and cultural historians on cleanliness, hair-care, shaving and male identity rarely refers to the history of medicine and vice versa.2 This is problematic because, consciously or otherwise, it suggests a division between serious history and more frivolous studies. Yet, as Cavallo and others have shown, the early modern body was imagined as a fragile vessel whose humoral balance was under constant threat. Hair growth was a form of bodily purging. According to early modern treatises: ‘so the hair upon the human body likewise expunge and relieve all the organs within and also the head of any unwanted coarseness’.3 The advent of wigs in the eighteenth century did not diminish the demand for hair-care; if anything it created further opportunities, with barbers looking after their clients’ wigs as well as their hair.

Aesthetics · Art · Elite · Identity (music) · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Visual arts · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Medicine

• Art on the edge

  Open Access•Evelyn Welch•Renaissance Studies•2009

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• Contracting a Cure

  Laura Ikins Stern, Gianna Pomata•American Journal of Legal History•1999

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• The Renaissance Beard

  Open Access•Will Fisher•Renaissance Quarterly•2001

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