A couple of hundred years ago, many people subscribed to a theory that we would consider barbaric today. It was called bloodletting. When a person became ill, it was believed that the sickness was caused by something wrong in the blood. An entire body of medical science was built around the premise that “bad blood” caused different forms of diseases.

The significance of that theory was that there was nobody who was readily available to remove your blood except for the barber. Why barbers? Because they were skilled with razors, of course!

Therefore, during this era you could go to the barber, sit in the chair and ask the man — it was always a man in those days — to make an incision in your wrist to be bled into a pan. White rags would have been used to bind your wounds, and you'd be sent home, hopefully feeling better. Interestingly, that combination of red blood and white cloth was depicted on striped poles as a symbol of barbers.

I have yet to find anybody who can point me to a medical statistic that shows slitting people's wrists and allowing their blood to run into a pan ever resolved major health dilemmas. Now here's the tricky question: How many of you have gone to the barber lately when not feeling well? The answer is likely none, because there has been a separation in the body of knowledge between shaving and cutting hair and diagnosing and treating maladies.

Today's surgeons are vastly different from their predecessors of the late 1700s. The difference between them isn't necessarily measured in years. It's measured in terms of competency and credibility. A surgeon has to undergo extensive training and education to have the ability to work on a human body. Of course, it's interesting to me that in most states you still need a license to practice as a barber or a beautician.

Now what about us in the fire service. Have we advanced as much as either the barber or the surgeon? An argument can be made that we have. I've done a lot of research on the development of fire service professional standards as part of my educational experience. However, our track record of developing our credibility and our competency isn't as old as many of us would like to believe.

The first person we can find in the history of the fire service who said that a firefighter had to have specific skills and abilities wasn't even an American. It was Chief James Braidwood from Edinburgh, Scotland. His ideas were followed shortly thereafter by his professional successor, Sir Eyre Massey Shaw, chief of the London Fire Brigade. Both of these gentlemen openly declared that there was a body of knowledge, different from other occupations, to perform the tasks of a firefighter.

Their work was followed up in this country with the development of fire training in the early 1900s. Among the first cities to have a fire training academy were those major metropolitan areas where drill towers were constructed. Chief Ralph J. Scott from Los Angeles actually advocated the creation of the fire service career development concept through the development of a fire service occupational analysis. [Ed.: See “Legacies,” Nov. 2000, available at <www.firechief.com>.]

Yes, we've done a good job of creating our profession over the last 50 years. For many good reasons, we have put almost all of our eggs in the basket of training the entry-level firefighters. We have developed more information that we have delivered to our driver operators. Then we placed a lot of emphasis on our company officers. But guess what's missing? You're right. It's the capstone at the top, the job of the fire chief.

It's not that we don't know there are specific skills and abilities needed up at the top. The state of California and the Canadian fire service have worked extensively to develop career development guides for fire chiefs, and the International Association of Fire Chiefs sponsored the creation of the Chief Fire Officer Designation Program.

The real question is whether the fire service will force its chiefs to evolve in the same way that surgeons evolved from barbers. Will we start raising the bar? One step to making that evolution is to have a bar to go over, such as the CFOD program. Still in its infancy, it contains a requirement that you put your knowledge, skills and experience on the line so that they can be reviewed and evaluated.

Boy, that sounds downright dangerous, but if the top-level fire officers in this country are willing to put their background, education and experience out for review, there's a good chance that others may follow suit. I'm referring specifically to the next generation of fire officers who are going to be taking over the operation sooner or later.

Right now I hear a lot of arguments that say those people simply aren't qualified to take over. I don't believe that, but I do believe that we have a prime need in this country for us to begin to identify what it is that makes our top chief officer candidates function as they do.

I'm sure that there are some of you reading this column who feel you don't need it, and you may be right. If you're so close to retirement that you're already sending out invitations for the dinner, then you probably won't be around to contribute to anything in the next 18-24 months.

On the other hand, if you're one of those who looks at the calendar to measure retirement instead of the clock to measure your workday, then perhaps you need it more than you think. You have an obligation to be doing everything that you can to prepare the next generation of fire chiefs. What better role model do they have than you?

By becoming enrolled in the CFOD, there's no danger of someone looking at you as incompetent. There is a danger that someone will ask you how you learned a particular piece of job knowledge and if you've had the experience and opportunity to use that information on a daily basis. The answers may help you improve yourself, and they may be useful to other prospective chiefs who can learn from you instead of reinventing the wheel.

If we go back far enough in history, we can see that the barber pole was created around the same time as many of the traditions in the American fire service. Like that profession, a branch of which evolved to better contribute to society through the creation of a new collection of knowledge, perhaps it's time for us in the fire service to start making a similar distinction.

It's time for us to decide if the symbols of our profession are going to stand for obsolete practices like bloodletting, or for future achievements and a broader collection of knowledge.

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Ronny J. Coleman is the president of the Fire & Emergency Television Network and a 40-year veteran of the fire service. He has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.