BLOODLETTING INSTRUMENTS - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

NUMBER 41 19
horn from Madaoua, Niger Republic (West Africa),
used for drawing blood in the 1960s. The director
of the Baptist Mission, who sent the horn, noted
that he had often seen Africans sitting in the market
place with such horns on their backs or their
heads. Scarifications were made with a handmade
razor.^*
In addition to horn cups, the ancients employed
bronze cups in which a vacuum was obtained by
inserting a piece of burning flax or linen into the
cup before its application to the skin. Most Greek
and Roman cups were made of metal.^^ Although
Galen already preferred glass cups to metal cups for
the simple reason that one could see how much
blood was being evacuated, metal cups were used
until modern times. Their main virtue was that
they did not break and thus could be easily transported.
For this reason, metal cups were especially
useful to military surgeons. Brass and pewter cups
were common in the eighteenth century, and tin
cups were sold in the late nineteenth century.
Since the latter part of antiquity, cups have been
made of glass. The Smithsonian possesses two Persian
opaque glass cups dating from the twelfth
century, called "spouted glasses" because of the
spout protruding from the side of the cup by which
the cupper exhausted the air with his mouth.
Similar spouted glasses were illustrated by Prosper
Alpinus (sixteenth century), so designed that the
blood would collect in a reservoir instead of being
sucked into the cupper's mouth. Like the horn
cups illustrated by Alpinus, the glass cups were provided
with a small valve made of animal skin. It
appears that the sixteenth-century Egyptians were
not familiar with the use of fire for exhausting
cups. (Figure 9.)
Cupping and leeching were less frequently practiced
in the medieval period, although general
bloodletting retained its popularity.^^ When the
eastern practice of public steam baths was reintroduced
into the West in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, cupping tended to be
left in the hands of bath attendants (Bagnio men)
and ignored by regular surgeons. Some surgeons,
such as Pierre Dionis, who gave a course of surgery
in Paris in the early eighteenth century, saw little
value in the operation. He felt that the ancients
had greatly exaggerated the virtues of the remedy.^'^
Another French surgeon, Ren^ de Garengeot, argued
in 1725 that those who resorted to such
FIGURE 9.—Persian spouted cupping glass, 12 th century.
(NMHT 224478 [M-8037]; SI photo 73-4215.)
outdated remedies as cupping had studied the
philosophical systems of the ancients more than
they had practiced medicine. He accused the admirers
of the ancients of wishing to kill patients
"with the pompous apparatus of wet cupping." ^^
(Figure 10.)
Nineteenth-century cuppers tended to blame the
baths for the low status of cupping among surgeons.
Dionis had described the baths in Germany as great
vaulted halls with benches on two sides, one side
for men and the other for women. Members of
both sexes, nude except for a piece of linen around
the waist, sat in the steamy room and were cupped,
if they so desired, by the bath attendants. The
customers' vanity was satisfied by making the scarifications
(which left scars) in the form of hearts,
love-knots, and monograms.^^ Mapleson's complaint
against the baths in 1813 was typical of the reaction
of the nineteenth-century professional cupper:
The custom which appears to have become prevalent of resorting
to these Bagnios, or Haumaums, to be bathed and
cupped, appears to have superseded the practice of this
operation by the regular surgeons. Falling into the hands of
mere hirelings, who practiced without knowledge, and without
any other principle than one merely mercenary, the