Guest post: Curious Cupping

This post is hopefully the first in a series of posts that will look at some of the therapeutic treatments and medical practices used in early modern medicine.

Dr Sara Read

With the interest in the practice of cupping in the press recently caused by celebrities appearing with the tell-tale circular bruises on their backs, I thought it timely to have a look at some of the ways that cupping was used as a medical treatment in the seventeenth century.

The practice is an ancient one, but this post is concerned with how it was applied specifically in our time period. Who performed it? Who was it used for? What sort of diseases was it prescribed for? What was the logic behind its use?

When a patient presented with a disease which was assumed to be caused by too much blood, then cupping might be prescribed. The position on the body in which the cupping glasses were to be applied was connected to the disease it was attempting to cure. They could be place anywhere from head to toe. The air in the glass was exhausted by burning a candle and the vacuum created in the glass caused the skin to be sucked into the glass on application. The idea was then that the excess humour was encouraged to the surface for easier dissipation. Philip K. Wilson has described cupping as a ‘common variety of bloodletting’.1 This is because cupping was used with or without scarification being done first.  Scarification (cutting or scratching the skin) would cause bleeding which was then accelerated by the cupping, and the blood removed would gather in the glass. This seems to be what is being depicted in the image below. If the skin was not broken, this was sometimes called ‘dry-cupping’ and resulted in a blister, full of unwanted humours.

As well as being used as a treatment by trained medical doctors, cupping was also practised by the same barber-surgeons who offered bloodletting and teeth-pulling. It was also a treatment offered by travelling mountebanks who would do it in public places surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. One so-called ‘quack’ doctor, John Evans produced an advertisement for his cures at his ‘hummums’ or baths. Baths came to be associated with cupping. In Brownlow Street, Drury Lane, you could take a sweat treatment in a hot bath, or a cold bath depending on your symptoms and also receive ‘fine cupping’ with reassuringly clean linen, for three shillings for one, or two for just five shillings. Alternatively Evans was prepared to come to your home if you required to be ‘cupt’ in your own chamber. The fact that Evans points out that you can expect to be well attended by servants of both sexes and that you could hire a room for the night, together with the warning that his establishment could be located by ‘the two spikes before the door’ to prevent mistakes, probably hints at the other function of the bath house as a brothel.2

Cupping was recommended by conventional medicine in the seventeenth century for a wide variety of diseases. It was thought particularly useful in cases of chest infection. Jean Feyens recommended cupping for many conditions which were caused by having too much wind in the body. If you had headaches so-caused, he said, then cupping glasses should be applied to the head, without bleeding.3 Alternatively, if wind caused you to suffer bloating or a ‘puffing of the stomach’ then ‘a large Cupping-glass applied three or four times without Scarification to the belly, so that it may comprehend the Navel, doth often make a perfect Cure’.4 Feyens does warn that cupping won’t help much in a case of colic, however.5 Lazare Rivière’s mid-seventeenth century treatise on the diseases of women described how to use cupping to treat ‘sickness of the womb’.

The sick woman must be laid upon the bed in such a posture that her neck and shoulders lie high and sloping, but her thighs and privy parts lie low, so the womb can be more easily reduced. Then must her lower parts be tied very hard so as to cause pain. Likewise they must be well rubbed and chafed. large cupping glasses were then to be set on her hips and pubic area. Take care not to apply a cupping glass upon the patient’s navel, which many ignorant are wont to do, for that will draw the womb upwards again.6

Rivière’s comments make it clear that some skill was needed to apply cupping glasses to best effect. The passing reference to the ‘ignorant’ who wrongly apply treatment is a common theme in medical treatises of prominent physicians at the time, who were keen to distance themselves from quacks like Evans. Another gynaecological complaint for which Rivière prescribed cupping was heavy periods. Here he suggested that ‘Rubbings, binding and cupping-glasses are also good, especially if the cupping-glasses be fastened upon her breasts’.7

As can be seen from these examples, while cupping was often seen as a gentler alternative to traditional phlebotomy, the fact that it was often done in combination with scratching the skin, rubbing and chafing it, means that it was probably just as unpleasant an option. Its availability at baths houses and such, suggests that it was a treatment that early modern people might seek out if they felt it might be helpful in rebalancing their humours.