s. Creating an all-purpose
syringe that would extract or inject liquids into any part of the body was
yet another inventor's dream. Two of the earliest English surgical patents
were awarded to two such syringes. John Read (1760-1847), surgical
instrument maker for the British Army and the East India Company, patented
a pump in 1820 for use in "extracting poison from the stomach,
administering clysters, introducing tabacco fumes into the bowels,
transfusion of blood, draining off the urine, injecting the bladder,
female injection, anatomical injection, administration of food and
medicine, cupping, drawing the breasts ... &c."[132] John Weiss, inventor
of the improved scarificator, invented his own patent syringe in 1825,
which he claimed to be superior to all previous syringes because it
employed stopcocks in place of valves, which were subject to leakage and
clogging. Cupping was only one of many operations that could be performed
with its aid. The Truax Surgical Pump is an example of a late
nineteenth-century all-purpose patent pump outfit that included cups among
its numerous optional attachments.[133] (Figure 14.)

Those who went a step further in their efforts to improve cupping
procedure attempted to combine cup, lancet, and exhausting apparatus all
in one instrument. Bayfield described and rejected several such devices in
1823, including perhaps the earliest, that of the Frenchman, Demours.
Demours' instrument, first introduced in 1819, consisted of a cupping
glass with two protruding tubes, one containing a lancet, and the other an
exhausting syringe. The lancet, surrounded by leather to keep air out of
the cup, could be supplemented by a cross with four additional blades, if
more than one puncture was desired.[134] In 1819, Thomas Machell, a member
of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, described a similar apparatus
in which the glass cup was separated from the tin body of the apparatus by
a flexible tube. The facility and precision of the instrument, claimed
Machell, "are incalculably surpassed by the power of its application to
any part whatever of the surface, under any circumstances indicating its
propriety, and by any person untrained to the manual dexterity of a
professed cupper."[135]

Professional cuppers who took pride in their skill naturally avoided such
novelties. Bayfield found the complex instruments objectionable because
even "the most trifling degree of injury is generally sufficient to rend