Barber, a shaver of the beard (Lat. barba), and usually also a hair-cutter. Barbers are of great antiquity; the office of the barber is referred to by the prophet Ezekiel (v. 1). In all oriental countries, including China, the shaving the whole or part of the head continues to be performed by barbers. In every part of the world, the professional barber and hairdresser is celebrated for his garrulity and general obliging qualities, such being required by those who place themselves in his hands. The amusing character of the barber in one of the tales in the Arabian Nights, and also of the barber in Rossini's opera of Figaro, will readily occur to recollection. Barbers at one time acted as a kind of surgeons, and accordingly occupied a higher social position than they now enjoy. Latterly, on account of the simple mode of trimming the hair, and of the prevalence of private shaving, the business of the barber in England has greatly declined, and his services are much more confined to the humbler classes. In the United States, the business of the barber is largely in the hands of the coloured population. Anciently, one of the utensils of the barber was a brass basin, with a semicircular gap in one side to compass a man's throat, by which means, in applying the lather to the face, the clothes were not soiled. Readers will recollect that Don Quixote assumed a barber's basin as a helmet—Mambrino's. At the end of a pole, the brass basin is still hung out as a sign at the door of the barber in Scotland, Germany, and other countries.
In former times, as already stated, barbers acted as a kind of surgeons, or at least phlebotomists, and such appears to have been the case in all countries. Till this day, on the barber's pole, there is represented a twisted or spiral ribbon, which symbolises the winding of a ribbon round the arm previous to blood-letting. In London, Edinburgh, and elsewhere, the barbers formed corporations with certain privileges. The surgical duties of these bodies now pertain to the corporations of surgeons. The Company of Barber-surgeons was first incorporated by Edward IV. in 1461; in 1540 its title was changed to 'Company of Barbers and Surgeons,' and the practitioners of 'barbary' were restricted to drawing of teeth. In 1745 an act was passed, from whose preamble we learn that the discovery had been made that the business or trade of a barber was 'foreign to, and independent of, the practice of surgery;' and it therefore dissolved the connection between the two bodies, and remitted the barbers to the more humble functions they now perform. But this is done with an express saving of all their privileges as a company or corporation, and as such they exist to the present day. The barbers still retain their ancient hall—which they possessed before the surgeons were disunited from them—in Monkwell Street, Cripplegate, in the city of London. See BEARD, GUILDS, SURGEONS; and Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (1890).