Inside a seventeenth-century Welsh barber-surgeon’s shop.

One from the archives – a little look at the interior of a 17th-century barber-surgeon’s shop.

Dr Alun Withey

Much of the work I’ve been doing recently on the history of shaving and masculinity in the enlightenment has concentrated on self-shaving…technically called auto-pogonotomy. The mid eighteenth century was really the first time when men started to eschew the barber and do the job themselves or, if they were well off, get their servant to do it. Some advertisements for male servants even stipulated that the prospective applicant had to be proficient in shaving.

Through my work on medical history, though, I’ve also been interested in the shops and contents of medical practitioners, especially doctors and apothecaries, but also barbers. One way of looking at this is through probate inventories. When people died, as part of the probate process, an inventory was made of all their possessions, and these can often reveal a great deal about material culture and individual lives. Often they are not detailed, and simply lump the…

View original post 741 more words