[290] Bequaem—suitable, good. [↑]
[291] De schipper ende stuerman; namely, Jacob Heemskerck and William Barentsz. [↑]
[293] Koyen kasen—lit. cow-cheeses, because they were made from the milk of cows, and not of sheep, as is not uncommon in the Netherlands. [↑]
[294] Ejinde van sparren—ends of spars. [↑]
[296] De barbier—the barber. This is the person who on a former occasion (page 121) was called de surgijn—the surgeon. In the general decline of science during the middle ages, surgery, as a branch of medicine, became neglected, and its practice, in the rudest form, fell into the hands of the barber; from whose ordinary avocations of cutting the hair, shaving the beard, paring the nails, etc., the step was not very great to the operations of tooth-drawing, bleeding, cupping, dressing wounds, setting broken limbs, etc. And, with these functions of the surgeon, the barber not unreasonably assumed his title also.
The rivalry between these barber-surgeons and the pure surgeons, who again sprang up on the revival of learning, is matter of history.
In England, a compromise between the two rival bodies was early effected by means of the union of the barber-surgeons and surgeons of London, by the statute of 32 Hen. VIII, c. 41 (A.D. 1540), which, while nominally amalgamating them, virtually effected the separation of the two professions; inasmuch as those members of the united corporation “using barbery”—as it was somewhat barbarously expressed—were prohibited from “occupying any surgery, letting of blood, or any other thing belonging to surgery, drawing of teeth only except”; while, on the other hand, surgeons were forbidden to “use barbery”. And the natural consequence was their formal separation into two entirely distinct bodies by the Act of 18 Geo. II, c. 15 (A.D. 1745).
On the continent, the barber-surgeon retained his rank to a much later date; and in France, in particular, till the revolution of 1793. [[126]]But, instead of abandoning the razor to the hair-dresser, he still claimed the right of wielding it, “as being a surgical instrument”; so that, in order to distinguish between the two, it was ordained by Louis XIV, that the barber-surgeon should have for his sign a brass basin, and should paint his shop-front red or black only, whereas the barber-hairdresser should display a pewter basin, and paint his shop-front in any other colour. Blue was the colour usually adopted by the barber-hairdressers, and to this colour their name has in consequence become attached. That the connexion between the two is still not lost sight of in France, is proved by the following extract from the Comédies et Proverbes of Alfred de Musset, p. 510:—