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WARNING: This exhibit contains content that may be sensitive to those struggling with mental health. This is meant for informational purposes and is in no way recommended as a way to deal with melancholy. Please reach out to someone for help if you are suffering from mental illness.
Past
Present
Barber's Pole
Razor Blades
This artifact is something that many of you recognize: the barber's pole that is still sometimes seen outside of barber shops. What you may not know about this object is that the stripes of red and white have a meaning behind them; they weren't randomly selected to fit an aesthetic. The contrasting red and white stripes were meant to represent both clean and bloodied bandages. In the past, barbers were once barber surgeons and would carry out the practice of bloodletting, either with leeches or other tools.
In the past, bloodletting has been practiced as a way to balance out the four humours: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Physicians thought that by draining people of blood, it helped restore balance of the humours. This was used to treat melancholy, arthritis, dizziness, liver disease, and other illnesses (Kuriyama). This remedy was even used for George Washington when his throat was inflamed. Washington eventually died, likely from a combination of the heavy loss of blood and from the illness itself (Hamilton).
Galen was a Greek physician who invented the idea of these humours and the concept that in order to be healthy, the humours must be balanced within the body. If the humours are unbalanced, then it will cause a person to be sick. With the practice of bloodletting, the draining of blood releases an excess of humours that may exist or diverts blood to a different part of the body (Brain). Doing this was thought to cure the patient that was suffering from an illness. In the medical field today, this is no longer practiced as it has been debunked for not being a relevant, effective remedy.
In society it's common to see various forms of self-harm, some which may even go unrecognized by the instigator/sufferer, in people suffering from mental health issues such as depression. The exhibit above shows razors, which some people (typically adolescents from 13 to 17 years of age) use to draw blood and harm themselves. This is a practice that was once viewed as a way to manipulate others, but now is realized as a consequence of mental disorders and in some cases can be an addictive practice (Chaney). In the past, these people would have been considered to be suffering from melancholy instead of the term we've now coined as "depression," or other disorders. These people would have subjected to medial practices to such as bloodletting to cure their melancholy. Scientifically, this practice has been disproven as being ineffective and in reality doing nothing to cure melancholy.
People will still sometimes "cut" themselves when they are very upset, drawing blood, without the intention of killing themself. A question might be why would people still do this? In a book by Adler, this is explained as a coping mechanism in which this gives emotional pain a physical outlet which puts the pain in a form which can be dealt with by the self-injurer. The physical harm that occurs provides the self-injurer a sense of catharsis, or release, from this emotional pain for a brief period of time.
In a study done by Holliday and Brennan, adolescents who had reported self-harm were interviewed about what the reasons may have been for them to commit self-harm. The results showed the leading reasons consisted of an inability to express their emotions otherwise and using self-harm as a way to help manage the emotions they were experiencing. Self-harm serves as a way to give a physical weight to the emotions the self-injurer is experiencing internally. While this is a choice one makes to harm themself, it's possible that the bloodletting treatment in the past may have had this same cathartic release of emotions that self-harm is used for today.
Works Cited
Bloodletting
Brain, Peter. Galen on Bloodletting a Study of the Origins, Development and Validity of His Opinions, with a Translation of the Three Works. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa. “Interpreting the History of Bloodletting.” OUP Academic, Oxford University Press, 1 Jan. 1995, https://academic.oup.com/jhmas/article-abstract/50/1/11/748041.
Whitelaw, W. A., and Scott Hamilton. “FROM HAIRCUTTERS TO HEMOCHROMATOSIS: A HISTORY OF BLOODLETTING.” The Proceedings of the 11th Annual History of Medicine Days, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, March 22nd and 23rd, 2002, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, 2002, pp. 162–168.
Self-Harm
Adler, Patricia A., and Peter Adler. The Tender Cut: The Rise and Transformation of Self-Injury. New York University Press, 2011.
Chaney, Sarah. Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harm. Reaktion Books Ltd, 2019.
Holliday, Robert, and Cathy Brennan. “Understanding Adolescents' Experiences of Self-Harm: Secondary Analysis of Family Therapy Sessions from the Shift Trial.” Taylor & Francis, 17 Nov. 2018, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/13811118.2018.1501448.
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