Cupping Across Different Cultures

By Ella Leung · Written October 2026

Cupping (拔罐, báguàn) is not one practice but a family of them: a cup or other hollow object is placed against the skin, a vacuum is created inside it, and the skin is drawn up into the vessel. Versions of this gesture appear in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, Chinese, South Asian, and European records — at different times, under different names, and explained by theories that do not agree with one another. Because those records do not line up into a single chain, this page sets them side by side and does not argue that cupping came from one place.

1. What the word covers

In standard modern descriptions, cupping is a technique that uses the vacuum under a small vessel applied to the skin [1]. The clinical literature usually sorts it into two broad kinds. Dry cupping uses suction alone. Wet cupping adds small incisions or superficial scratches first, so that a little blood is drawn into the cup — a much smaller amount than in older vein bloodletting [2].

This page is about the records, the names, and the ideas behind them. It does not teach the technique: it does not describe pressure, timing, placement, or the materials used in any practice, and it does not present cupping as a treatment for any condition.

2. Early records, region by region

Egypt. The Ebers Papyrus, dated to about 1550 BCE and among the oldest surviving medical texts, describes the use of heated cups and animal horns in a way that later writers read as cupping [3].

Greece and Rome. In the Greek tradition, Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE) is reported to have recommended cupping for musculoskeletal pain, menstrual complaints, and congestion of the organs [4]. In Rome, the physician Galen (129–199 CE) advocated both bloodletting and cupping; the therapy was popular in the later Roman Empire, was taken up by medieval Arab physicians, and spread through Italy and the rest of Europe during the Renaissance [5]. Some accounts also credit the first-century Roman writer Celsus with preferring cupping to cutting a vein; this page did not confirm a primary text for that and marks it unverified [6].

The Islamic world. As Greek medical works were translated into Arabic, cupping was absorbed and reorganised. In Arabic it is ḥijāmah (حجامة), a word whose root hajm means "to suck" or "to draw off"; the practitioner is a ḥajjām and the cup a miḥjama [7]. The physician al-Rāzī (Rhazes, c. 860–925) distinguished wet cupping (ḥijāmah bi'l-sharṭ, with scratches) from dry (ḥijāmah bilā sharṭ, without), and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980–1037) gave the therapy a systematic place in his Canon of Medicine [8]. In Islamic Spain, the surgeon al-Zahrāwī (Albucasis, 936–1013) illustrated cupping instruments and procedures in the thirtieth treatise of his al-Taṣrīf [9].

China. In Chinese, cupping is 拔罐 (báguàn): 拔 (bá) suggests "drawing up" or "pulling out" and 罐 (guàn) is a jar or pot. Its older name was 角法 (jiǎofǎ), the "horn method," and it was also called 吸筒 ("suction-tube") therapy [10]. Chinese popular-medicine accounts date the earliest record to the Wushier Bingfang (《五十二病方》, "Prescriptions for Fifty-Two Diseases"), a text composed in the Warring States period and recovered from a Han tomb at Mawangdui, where a horn is used to draw on a haemorrhoid; the Jin-era physician Ge Hong is also cited, in his Zhouhou Beiji Fang (《肘后备急方》, "Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies"), for the same "horn method," and Tang-era works describe bamboo-tube cupping [10]. An English review, however, states that the earliest clear Chinese reference is Ge Hong, and infers from this that cupping was not a mainstay of early Chinese medicine [11]. The two accounts disagree about which text is "first"; this page marks the earliest-record claim contested and does not settle it [12].

South Asia. Ayurvedic sources, including the Suśruta Saṃhitā, describe a procedure resembling wet cupping called alabu karma ("the gourd method"), used to remove what the texts call vitiated blood [13].

Europe, medieval to modern. Through the Middle Ages and after, cupping was bound up with bloodletting and practised by physicians and by barber-surgeons. It reached a peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when purpose-made kits combined a scarificator for cutting the skin with glass cups, and when "cuppers" worked as a trade [14]. Modern descriptions note that wet cupping is still found in China, Korea, and parts of Eastern Europe, and that in the Middle East and North Africa it is known as al-hijamah [15].

3. Time and place at a glance

The table groups the records above by region and period. It is a reading aid, not a ranking, and the entries are the records of a practice, not claims that it works.

4. Naming the practice

The English word comes from the cup itself [17]. Other traditions name the practice after what the vessel or the action does, and the names are not equivalents of one another — a wet-cupping term in one language may have no matching single word in another.

5. What the traditions share, and where they differ

The shared shape is simple and repeatable: suction is created on the skin, and the surface is drawn up. Most records then explain the gesture the same way in outline — something is being moved toward the surface and out: morbid humour in Greek and Islamic medicine, "vitiated blood" in Ayurveda, wind or stagnancy and the movement of qi and blood in Chinese practice. The visible marks left by the cups are read in every tradition as meaningful [2][8][18].

The differences are just as real. The theories are not translations of one another: humoural medicine, Ayurvedic blood-letting, and Chinese qi-and-movement ideas are separate frameworks, not dialects of a single system. Some traditions cut the skin (wet cupping) and some did not (dry). The tools change with time and place — horns, gourds, shells, bamboo, bronze, ceramic, glass, and later plastic or silicone with mechanical suction [9]. And some settings carry a religious or spiritual meaning: in parts of the Islamic tradition cupping is linked to Prophetic practice and to rules about where on the body it may be done, while StatPearls notes cupping also appears in folk, cultural, and (in some accounts) spiritual healing contexts [18].

6. Why this page does not pick a single origin

It is tempting to ask which culture "invented" cupping. The records do not answer that question, and it may not be the right question. Four points make a single-origin story hard to support.

First, the records do not form one chain. They appear in different regions, in different centuries, with no shared vocabulary and no clear line of transmission from one to the next [3][10][13]. Second, they are explained by theories that conflict; a story that moves from Egypt to Greece to the Islamic world to China has to flatten those frameworks into one, which the sources do not do [8][11]. Third, the "earliest" record is itself disputed — as the Chinese case shows, where sources disagree about whether the honour belongs to the Wushier Bingfang or to Ge Hong [12]. Fourth, the idea that suction can be used on the body is not a rare or secret one: hollow horns, gourds, shells, and bamboo were all widely available, so similar practices could arise in more than one place without travelling between them.

For all these reasons, this page reports what each tradition records and refuses to name a birthplace. The same caution applies to cupping's neighbour, gua sha: the history of scraping is treated separately, and it too shows related practices under different names in several countries (article #13).

7. Sources and limits

This page compares how cupping appears in different regional and historical records, and why a single point of origin cannot be drawn from them. It does not teach the technique, does not describe cups, pressure, timing, or placement for practice, does not compare the effectiveness of any regional or modern form, and does not promise any health result. Where this page reports what a tradition says, it reports a claim made inside that tradition — not a confirmed mechanism and not a health claim. Dates given for ancient texts are the conventional ones used by the cited sources; where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved [11][12][19].

Sources

1. Reddog E. Sina and Abdullah A. Bokhari, "Cupping Therapy," StatPearls (updated 30 October 2023). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538253/
2. M. S. Abate et al., "Cupping therapy: A prudent remedy for a plethora of medical ailments," Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine (PMC4488563). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4488563/
3. Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) as an early record of cupping — Abate et al. (PMC4488563); and Ishrat Rasool et al., "Hijāmah Through the Ages: Evolution from Ancient to Modern Practice," Austin Hematology (2026). https://austinpublishinggroup.com/hematology/fulltext/hematology-v13-id1495.pdf
4. Hippocrates reported to recommend cupping — Abate et al. (PMC4488563); Rasool et al. (2026).
5. "Bleeding and cupping," Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (PMC2494264), on Galen and the spread of cupping to Europe. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2494264/
6. The claim that the Roman writer Celsus preferred cupping to vein bloodletting — unverified on this page (seen only on a history-of-medicine blog citing Celsus, De Medicina 14.58; a primary text was not confirmed).
7. Ḥijāmah and its root hajm; ḥajjām, miḥjama — Rasool et al. (2026); Sina and Bokhari, StatPearls (2023).
8. Al-Rāzī on wet (bi'l-sharṭ) and dry (bilā sharṭ) cupping; Ibn Sīnā's systematic account in Al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb — Rasool et al. (2026).
9. "Abul-Qasim Al-Zahrawy's practice of cupping therapy (Hijama) during the tenth century: a documentation," Traditional Medicine Research (TMR); and Sami Hamarneh, "Drawings and Pharmacy in al-Zahrāwī's 10th-Century Surgical Treatise" (Gutenberg). https://www.tmrjournals.com/public/articlePDF/20220602/6b39ce890f64a648706819a823f00612.pdf ; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26038/pg26038-images.html
10. 广东省中医药局 [Guangdong Provincial Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine], "拔罐能治什么病？这些误区要避开" [What can cupping treat? How to avoid these misconceptions], 1 September 2023 — on 拔罐 / 角法 / 吸筒, the Wushier Bingfang, Ge Hong's Zhouhou Beiji Fang, and Tang-era bamboo-tube cupping. http://szyyj.gd.gov.cn/zyyfw/ysbj/content/post_4246737.html
11. The claim that the earliest clear Chinese reference to cupping is Ge Hong (281–341 CE) — Rasool et al. (2026), contradicting the Chinese account in source 10.
12. The "earliest record" of cupping in China (the Wushier Bingfang, Warring States, recovered from a Han tomb at Mawangdui, versus Ge Hong) — contested and unverified on this page (sources 10 and 11 disagree; the Mawangdui provenance is reported but was not verified here).
13. Ayurvedic alabu karma ("gourd method") in the Suśruta Saṃhitā — Sina and Bokhari, StatPearls (2023); Rasool et al. (2026).
14. Cupping and bloodletting in eighteenth–nineteenth-century Europe; scarificator and cupping kits; the "cupper" trade; the German term Schröpfen — Old Operating Theatre Museum (London) collection notes; "Bleeding and cupping" (PMC2494264); PONS German–English dictionary, "schröpfen."
15. Al-Hijamah in the Middle East and North Africa; wet cupping still found in China, Korea, and parts of Eastern Europe — Sina and Bokhari, StatPearls (2023).
16. Regional modern terms — Korean buhang (부항), Japanese kyūkaku (吸角), Vietnamese giác hơi — unverified on this page (seen mainly on consumer, clinic, and wellness pages; romanisation and precise senses were not confirmed).
17. English "cupping" from "cup," Latin cupa ("cask, container") — etymonline; the Greek and Latin names for the cupping vessel (e.g. a gourd term, cucurbita, ventosa) are unverified on this page (seen on course and popular pages).
18. Folk, cultural, religious, and spiritual readings of cupping; Taoist framing in terms of yin and yang; religious rules on placement — Sina and Bokhari, StatPearls (2023).
19. The StatPearls claim that "Egyptians and Macedonians" practised cupping around 5500 years ago and passed it to the Greeks — unverified on this page (stated without a primary source and not repeated as fact here).

Continue exploring