The tooth, the whole tooth … and the jawbone too

It’s free to subscribe, but if you would like to make a one-off contribution to the coffee supplies that keep me going, please go to my Ko-fi page here. Thank you!

An 18th-century sea voyage from the East Indies to Great Britain was at best tedious and at worst fatal, should disaster befall the vessel or disease break out on board.

For one gentleman in the 1760s, the last three months of the journey – though uneventful in terms of pirates, plagues and that sort of thing – were miserable thanks to the mouth ulcers that gnawed at his gums.

His case is among those related by Thomas Berdmore (1740-85), surgeon-dentist to King George III, in his concise and accessible A Treatise on the Disorders and Deformities of the Teeth and Gums (1768). At this period, English-language dental information was scarce; Pierre Fauchard’s 1728 book Le Chirurgeon Dentiste approached the subject in a detailed scientific way that would lead to the author becoming known as ‘the father of dentistry’, but it was only available in French and German. The average English-speaking tooth-drawer didn’t have the education to benefit from the French dentist’s wisdom. Berdmore sought to fill this literary cavity and improve practitioners’ knowledge of anatomy and dental disease, as well as informing the public about the importance of tooth care in keeping the rest of the body healthy.

While some people practising dentistry had – like Berdmore – trained as surgeons before specialising in teeth, others offered tooth extraction as an adjunct to their main calling as barbers or blacksmiths, and still others were classed as mountebanks, who travelled around ready to ‘ whip out a Tooth before the patient can look about him.’ For those in pain, these practitioners provided a valuable service – but their skill levels varied, and the desperate patient had to weigh up the risk of a broken jaw or fatal blood loss.

Leave a Comment