The barber also cleans the ears of his clients and cuts their nails,
and is the village surgeon in a small way. He cups and bleeds his
patients, applies leeches, takes out teeth and lances boils. In this
capacity he is the counterpart of the barber-surgeon of mediaeval
Europe. The Hindu physicians are called Baid, and are, as a rule,
a class of Brahmans. They derive their knowledge from ancient
Sanskrit treatises on medicine, which are considered to have divine
authority. Consequently they think it unnecessary to acquire fresh
knowledge by experiment and observation, as they suppose the perfect
science of medicine to be contained in their sacred books. As these
books probably do not describe surgical operations, of which little or
nothing was known at the time when they were written, and as surgery
involves contact with blood and other impure substances, the Baids do
not practise it, and the villagers are left to get on as best they can
with the ministrations of the barber. It is interesting to note that a
similar state of things appears to have prevailed in Europe. The monks
were the early practitioners of medicine and were forbidden to practise
surgery, which was thus left to the barber-chirurgeon. The status of
the surgeon was thus for long much below that of the physician. [296]
The mediaeval barber of Europe kept a bottle of blood in his window,
to indicate that he undertook bleeding and the application of leeches,
and the coloured bottles in the chemist's window may have been derived
from this. It is also said that the barber's pole originally served
as a support for the patient to lean on while he was being bled,
and those barbers who did the work of bleeding patients painted their
poles in variegated red and white stripes to show it.