Abstract
In 1811, the English satirist Thomas Rowlandson produced a coloured engraving, ‘A French Dentist Shewing a Specimen of his Artificial Teeth and False Palates’ (Figure 1). Under the heading ‘Mineral Teeth’ we read: ‘Monsieur de Charmant from Paris engages to affix from one tooth to a whole set without pain. Monsieur Dubois can also affix an artificial palate or a glass eye. He also distils.’1
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Notes
The main source for Dubois de Chémant’s life is G. Dagen, ‘Dubois de Chémant’, in Dagen, Documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’art dentaire en France, principalement à Paris (Paris, 1925).
See also C. Hillam, ed., Dental Practice in Europe at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 120–2.
For false teeth generally, see J. Woodforde, The Strange Story of False Teeth (London, 1968), esp. chs. 7, 8 and 9 (based almost entirely on Dagen).
For the wider cultural context, see A. Trumble, A Brief History of the Smile (New York, 2004).
L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992).
Cf. J. Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London, 1985);
and J. Black, France and the Grand Tour (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).
D. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969);
F. Crouzet, De la supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la France: l’économique et l’imaginaire (XVIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris, 1985);
J. R. Harris, Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France (London, 1992).
General histories of dentistry include M. Dechaume and P. Huard, Histoire illustrée de l’art dentaire (Paris, 1977);
M. E. Ring, Dentistry: An Illustrated History (New York, 1985);
and W. Hoffmann-Axthelm, History of Dentistry (Chicago, 1981).
See also C. Gysel, Histoire de l’orthodontie: ses origines, son archéologie et ses précurseurs (Antwerp, 1997).
Charles Allen, The Operator for the Teeth (1685), reprint edn, ed. R. A. Cohen (London, 1969), p. 11.
For George Washington, cf. R. Darnton, George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2003).
‘Transplanting the Teeth’ (1787–90). There is a good discussion of this topic in Mark Blackwell, ‘“Extraneous Bodies”: The Contagion of Live-Tooth Transplantation in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Life 28 (2004), 1: 21–68.
K. Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution. The Émigrés in London, 1789–1802 (London, 1999), p. 197 and see esp. ch. 4, ‘Soho’.
G. de Beers, The Sciences Were Never at War (London, 1960); and R. G. Dunbar, ‘The Adoption of the Practice of Vaccination into Napoleonic France’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 10 (1941).
Joseph Murphy, Natural History of the Human Teeth, with a Treatise on their Diseases … To Which are Added Observations on the Physiognomy of the Teeth and of the Projecting Chin (London, 1811), p. 133. Cf. J. P. De La Fons, A Description of the New Patent Instrument for Extracting the Teeth; also of a Patent Method of Fixing Artificial Teeth (London, 1826), pp. 49, 56; and Desirabode (dentist to Louis-Philippe), The Science and Arts of the Dentist (Baltimore, MD, 1847: published in French in 1843), p. 401.
For French dentistry in the eighteenth century, see the excellent R. King, The Making of the Dentiste, c. 1650–1760 (Aldershot, 1998); and P. Baron, ‘Part 1: France’, in Hillam, Dental Practice; and my ‘Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Past and Present 166 (2000).
A. Fraser, Marie-Antoinette: The Journey (London, 2001), p. 36.
Abbé Ferdinando Galiani and Louise d’Épinay, Correspondance, 4 vols (Paris, 1992–5): see esp. exchanges from late 1770 to late 1771 passim.
B. W. Weinberger, An Introduction to the History of Dentistry in America, 2 vols (Saint Louis, MO, 1948), ii, p. 171.
P. Fauchard, Le Chirurgien-Dentiste, ou Traité des dents (Paris, 1728; second edn, 1746; third edn, 1786). For the life, see A. Besombes and G. Dagen, Pierre Fauchard et ses contemporains (Paris, 1961).
Cf. esp. T. Gelfand, Professionalising Modem Medicine: Paris Surgeons and Medical Science and Institutions in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1980).
See esp. D. Roche, The People of Paris. An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Leamington Spa, 1987);
D. Roche, La Culture des apparences. Une histoire du vêtement (XVIIe-XVllle siècle) (Paris, 1991);
A. Pardailhé-Galabrun, La Naissance de l’intime: 3000 foyers parisiens, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1988).
Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, ed. H. Holcroft (1844 edn), p. 339; and for Cérutti, A. de Baecque, ‘Joseph-Antoine Cérutti et les caractères de la “gaieté française” (1738–92)’, in de Baecque, Les Éclats du rire: La culture des rieurs au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2000).
The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son, ed. C. Strachey, 2 vols (London, 1901), i, p. 285. The letters were published in 1774, and translated into French the following year.
See A. S. Hargreaves, ‘“Every Man According to his Work”: Some Huguenot Influences in Eighteenth-Century London’, Medical Historian: Bulletin of Liverpool Medical History Society 5 (1992): 15ff. There was a third-generation Hemet dentist too.
Cf. on this point Desirabode, Nouveaux élements complets de la science et de l’art du dentiste, 2 vols (Paris 1843), p. xi.
Classically in R. Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
More generally, see M. Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
C. Hillam, ‘The Availability of Dental Products in Britain at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Dental Historian 32 (1997): 64. There are some marvellous examples of dental publicity in the miscellany ‘Dental Memoranda collected by T. Purland 1844’, held in the Wellcome Library, London.
Journal de Madame Cradock. Voyage en France (1783–6), ed. O. Delphin (Paris, 1906), p. 330.
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© 2007 Colin Jones
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Jones, C. (2007). French Dentists and English Teeth in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Tale of Two Cities and One Dentist. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_7
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