Oral magic, folklore and tradition / by B.R. Townend.

  • Townend, B. R.
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Oral magic, folklore and tradition / by B.R. Townend. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    surgeon, states that operations on the teeth are appropriate to barbers and “ dentatores ” to whom the physician has abandoned them. This divorcement of medicine from surgery, whenever it commenced, was to continue until the nineteenth century. VVe can thus divide the practitioners who have occupied them¬ selves upon the teeth and mouth into four categories: — (1) The doctor or physician who early abandoned the practice of dentistry. He was educated in the medical schools of antiquity, or in the universities of mediaeval or later times. His was the academic training which kept alive through the Dark Ages the high traditions of the early Greek schools of medicine. (2) The barber surgeon who was essentially a craftsman, serving an apprenticeship and gaining his knowledge in tonsorial and surgical practice. Ambroise Pare is an example, and a worthy example of this class. Skilful, intelligent, rich in device and of an enquiring turn of mind. Out of this class the surgeon developed with a different outlook upon life than his more academic brother the physician—a difference in outlook which I venture to suggest still survives. (3) The peripatetic tooth puller—many of them worthy men. (4) A very numerous class which developed from the last category, the quack of the market-place, the charlatan, the man to whom the term “ tooth puller ” and “ tooth breaker ” is applied somewhat contemptuously. The first class of men had little or nothing to do with dentistry during the Middle Ages. The barber surgeon had less and less concern with dentistry as time went on, and before the revival of the scientific study of the teeth and their treatment which may be said to have been started by Pierre Fauchard in the eighteenth century, dentistry was in poor repute. There were, however, many good fellows practising. In the words of Guerini (History of Dentistry, p. 245) “ . . . the sphere of action of the true dental specialists of those times (especially the best among them) was not all so limited as imagined by those who affirm that in past times dentists properly so called did not exist, but only tooth pullers. . . . when the barber’s art came down to a very low level, the dental art must have degenerated too, and have been represented for a certain time only by ignorant barbers and tooth-pullers.” We have many literary pictures of those old toothdrawers and the
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