Cupping glasses & scarificator

Early/mid-nineteenth century

These cupping glasses are of the type that was used in the treatment of convict patients at the General ‘Rum’ Hospital for convicts, next to Hyde Park Barracks, between 1816 and 1848. Cupping involved the burning of a small piece of lint inside the glass cup, which created a vacuum. When placed on the skin, the vacuum drew the blood to the surface. The skin was first broken using a scarificator, which let the blood flow into the cup. Cupping was one form of bloodletting, also achieved by directly opening a vein with a fleam or lancet. This had been the standard medical practice for blood purification since the middle ages, and was one of the most common methods of treatment at the convict hospital in Sydney. Very quickly it gave the hospital a reputation and the convicts generally dreaded having to go there. In 1820 hospital assistant Henry Cowper reported that he had bled one patient suffering ‘brain fever’, two pounds in the morning and three pounds in the evening, but the patient had been allowed to get up immediately, after which he ‘dropped down Dead’.

Hospital assistant Henry Cowper, 1821, in John Ritchie (ed), Evidence to the Bigge Reports, Melbourne, Heinemann, 1971, vol 1, 142.