Julianna 
The red-and-white spiral outside the barbershop looks innocent enough. But in the Middle Ages, it meant something far darker: blood.
Barbers were once more than hair-cutters. They were the barber-surgeons of medieval Europe. The gutsy men who handled what physicians prescribed but refused to perform. They bled patients to balance the four humours, believing illness came from an excess of blood. Or, an imbalance in humours.
They also pulled teeth, lanced abscesses, stitched wounds, and even set bones. All of it was done without anaesthetic.
During bloodletting, the individual would sit in a chair, arm bare, and grasp a wooden pole to cause the veins to swell. The barber made a swift incision with a small lancet, letting the dark stream fill a brass bowl below. When finished, he wrapped the arm in linen bandages, which he later washed and hung outside to dry. Twisted by the wind, the red-stained cloths spiralled together, creating the familiar pattern that became the trade’s emblem. Sometimes men would do it just to feel more relaxed.
By the sixteenth century, the striped barber’s pole had become a recognised sign of the barber-surgeon’s craft, red for blood, white for bandages, and sometimes a brass bowl or gilt knob at the base to recall the vessel that caught the flow.
1540 – Barber-Surgeons Become Official
In 1540, Henry VIII formally joined barbers and surgeons under the Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. A man could come in for a shave, a haircut, and, if the physician had prescribed it, a “letting of blood.” It was routine, thought to purge fevers, calm the mind, and prevent plague.
When the professions finally separated in 1745, surgery began its march toward respectability, leaving the barbers with their spinning sign, a remnant of the centuries when medicine and grooming shared the same chair.
By the nineteenth century, most people thought the barber’s pole was merely decorative. Few realised that it had begun as a warning: a signal that inside, there were blades, basins, and men who worked in both hair and human flesh.
In America, the barber’s pole took on a new look. Immigrants brought the old symbol across the Atlantic, but a blue stripe was added, some say to represent veins, others as a patriotic nod to the flag’s colours. By the late nineteenth century, American towns were filled with bright red, white, and blue poles, spinning mechanically outside barbershops that now promised relaxation instead of surgery.
Next time you pass a barber’s shop and see that cheerful spiral turning in the sun, remember what it once meant, blood, pain, and the hum of steel.
Continued on Substack:
The story doesn’t end when the blood stops flowing. In the nineteenth century, razors gleamed, towels were clean, but infection still waited behind the chair. Discover how barbers became accidental killers in Blood, Razors, and Infection: The Perils Behind the Chair on True Ancient Horror Substack.
