Thread: Joseph Rodgers Scalpel

I found this J. Rodgers & Sons Scalpel on the bay & no one was bidding on it so I scored it cheap!
You can see a partial pic of it on this page:

The Shivering Beggar |

Thanks to Zak who was originally showing a little info on T. Scargill

very cool pick up !!

Nice score.

I believe it is not a scaple but a blood letting tool. Still extremely cool. Its called a fleamer.

The item is an eraser for use on vellum or heavily calendered paper. Mostly used by draftsmen and women to remove India Ink from the semi transparent Vellum/ Tracing paper that was used back in the day as the original to make blueprints from.
That method was going out of style by the 70s when computer scanning and printing processes came into common use.

Old draftsman here!
~Richard

Originally Posted by engine46

...snip...:
The Shivering Beggar |
Thanks to Zak who was originally showing a little info on T. Scargill

That is a great bit of history. Thanks!
~Richard

Originally Posted by Geezer

The item is an eraser for use on vellum or heavily calendered paper. Mostly used by draftsmen and women to remove India Ink from the semi transparent Vellum/ Tracing paper that was used back in the day as the original to make blueprints from.
That method was going out of style by the 70s when computer scanning and printing processes came into common use.

Old draftsman here!
~Richard

Thanks Richard
AT first I thought it was one of those "blood letting tool's" but it was a little different & the seller had it listed as a "scalpel knife". Very interesting tool. I learn something everyday! Thank you very much for the information on this piece! I almost did't go for it & it got down to one second & I hit the key & won it for a few bucks.

I have the same tool made by Palmera.

Nice piece of history! Very cool.

That one's Edwardian.

Among collectors of medical instruments, there's a good deal of debate about whether or not these were used as phleams (bloodletting tools).

The argument often presented is that as blood-letting went out of fashion in medicine, the cutlery firms rebranded them as ink-erasers. I'm relatively certain that's not the case, but there's a wide gray area wherein cutlery salesman could tell their buyers whatever they wanted to make sales. Ink erasers may well have been sold as phleams. Explicit phleams might well have been sold as steel erasers (which is how they were typically advertised).

The couple I've got, I got sold as scalpels or bloodletting tools. But certainly by 1900, catalogs from places like Rodgers were really very clear on what they were. Erasers.