In this chest are replicas of equipment used by 16th century barber surgeons. Barber surgeons would cut your hair and shave your beard like a modern-day barber, but they’d also perform medical operations and administer medicines like a modern-day surgeon.
You can see some of the wooden canisters that a surgeon would have used to store medicines, ointments, and unguents to the left of the chest. Many of these would have utilised herbs or spices like pepper, saffron, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
To the right are three, small, metal objects. The first is a fleam, used for bloodletting. In the early modern period, illness was thought to be a result of in imbalance in your body which could be treated by purging. A popular way to purge was to bleed the patient. A fleam like this was used to prick the vein and the blood would have been collected in a small bowl called a porringer. Bloodletting could be dangerous, and surgeons needed to be careful not to damage nerves, tendons or arteries.
Alongside the fleam are two retractors, used to pull apart and hold back the flesh during procedures. This would have been particularly useful when trying to remove shot or arrowheads from a wound.
An odd-looking object comprised of a leather-bag, a wooden stopper and a brass tube is a clyster pipe. Barber surgeons would have used clyster pipes to give enemas and administer medicines rectally. The bag would have been filled with fluids and then, once the brass pipe had been inserted into the patient, gently squeezed.
In the centre of the display is a metal object called a ‘dental pelican’. Pelicans were used to remove rotting or damaged teeth. The rounded end would be placed against the jaw, and the hook behind the tooth. This would allow the tooth to be levered from the jaw.
To the right-hand side of the chest are a collection of objects used for amputation. The hammer and chisel were used to quickly remove fingers and toes, whilst the blade and saw were for limbs. The blade cut down into the flesh, which would then have been pulled back whilst the saw was used to cut through the bone. The cauterising irons in the bottom left corner would have been heated in a chafing dish filled with hot coals and then applied to blood vessels to burn them shut, preventing excess blood loss. Whilst grisly, and extremely painful, amputation saved the lives of patients whose wounds had become badly infected or whose limbs had been crushed.