Bowl (smoking)

The character Leopold Bloom, in James Joyce's Ulysses carries a tobacco pipe with the bowl carved into a head: "He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob's pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head.

"[1] Thomas Curtis' London Encyclopaedia of 1839 describes a "fumigator", an instrument found in a doctor's surgery "for injecting tobacco smoke into the anus of drowned persons, with a view to excite the irritability of the muscles".

Curtis describes the best as being made by a W. Willurgby "the bowl of which is of cast brass and is large enough to contain about an ounce and a half of tobacco".

[3] The bowls of ceremonial pipes used in some indigenous American nations are often carved from red pipestone or catlinite,[4] a fine-grained easily worked stone of a rich red color of the Coteau des Prairies, west of the Big Stone Lake in South Dakota.

Within modern American cannabis culture, the term "bowl" is often used as a synecdoche to refer to an entire smoking device, especially a glass pipe.