Cheers for the Beard: Victorian Facial Hair at the Florence Nightingale Museum (360G-Wellcome-106601_Z_14_A)

The project explores the history of facial hair through time, and across different social and geographical spaces, Exploring individual British regions, as well as questions of beardedness at different social levels, it questions assumptions of elite hegemony and emulation that currently underpin existing historiography. It will recover the complex health/medical, cultural, scientific and intellectual changes that have affected views and styles of facial hair, as well as the extent to which bear ds have symbolised changing concepts of masculinity. Over the past three centuries facial hair has been closely bound with health. This study will chart various aspects from humoural views of facial hair to the beard as a visible index of health, and also its broader place within the shifting medical contexts of hair. This will include studies of medical remedies as well as the changing relationship between barbers and beards, including the eighteenth-century decline of the barber-surgeon and th e changing health and medical functions barbers undertook. It also explores the relationship between shaving technologies and the management of facial hair. Everything from cast steel to electric and disposable razors have made shaving easier, but this study interrogates the extent to which technologies directly influenced mens facial hair choices.