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Technology and Culture 42.1 (2001) 200-202



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Book Review

The Making of the Dentiste, 1650-1760


The Making of the Dentiste, 1650-1760. By Roger King. Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998. Pp. x+231. $94.95.

Roger King practiced dental surgery for fourteen years before turning his attention to its origins. His expertise allows him to effectively contradict the conventional view that modern dentistry evolved from accumulated experience. Instead, he demonstrates that--in France, at least--dental surgery arose as a specialty within general surgery; that this occurred at the beginning of the eighteenth century; that the actions and antics of barbers and tooth-pullers routinely cited by historians as integral to the discipline are at best peripheral to the skills and techniques of the dental surgeon; and that early modern dentists achieved legal, social, and professional recognition as specialists in the care of the teeth and mouth. In short, King delivers a history that is at once technical, cultural, revisionist, and entertaining.

Anyone made anxious by even routine dental appointments will also find his book scary. First, there are the pictures of tools (many of which would be at home in a blacksmith's shop) that were used to scrape tartar, remove dental caries, and extract teeth: the bow drill that clamped to the jaw with a vise makes one rejoice to be living in a world of Novocain, laughing gas, and lasers. Then there are the case histories, blow-by-blow accounts, one can truly say, of early modern dental care. Even though King does not deliberately stress the horrific, the stories of mangled jaws, inadvertently [End Page 200] broken teeth, and recurring abscesses are chilling. Fortunately, this sorry record is offset by equally painful but more successful experiences, most derived from the preeminent text of early modern dentistry, Pierre Fauchard's Le Chirurgien Dentiste (1728, 1746).

Fauchard is, in fact, the star of The Making of the Dentiste. Trained as a surgeon, electing to specialize in the maladies of the teeth and mouth, his approaches are surprisingly modern: artificial teeth implanted on gold posts anchored in the jaw; incisors straightened and bites improved; the use of gold wire to hold loose teeth in position. He even--apparently with consistent success--replaced extracted teeth in their sockets (a technique my own dentist dismissed as doomed to failure, before recalling a patient who has carried a rerooted wisdom tooth in the socket of an extracted first molar for some fifteen years).

For King, Fauchard's success as an oral surgeon is less important than his insistence that treatment be derived from an understanding of physiology, tempered by reasoned analysis of clinical experience (his own and that of his colleagues). This emphasis on the intellectual aspect of treatment allows King--who posits that "the practice of the dentiste [was] built on a science, a body of theoretical knowledge founded on fundamental principles" (p. 98)--to explore the rising prestige of dentistry. The improvement in social status did not come about because dentists were recognized as specialized surgeons rather than empirical tooth-pullers: until the early eighteenth century, surgeons (who were, of necessity, hands-on practitioners) had less social standing than physicians (who rarely touched their patients). Rather, surgeons (and dental surgeons with them) challenged the dominance of the physicians by establishing an academy, offering public courses, and monitoring competence; nor did it hurt that a few made themselves indispensable to the royal family, and were even ennobled. Although this story of interprofessional rivalry has been told before (primarily by Alfred Franklin in the nineteenth century), the recapitulation is pertinent here.

Like any text, The Making of the Dentiste has shortcomings. Some are minor: there is no summary to complement the excellent introduction; the long aside on the processes of ennoblement is interesting but unnecessary; citations from the French are sometimes translated and sometimes not, even within the same source (as King usually explains their gist, those without a reading knowledge of French are seldom disadvantaged); the desire for a fully furnished mouth is largely dismissed as an overemphasis on...

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