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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    genre painters and engravers of the past have also left us a wealth of pictorial representations of them. William Langdon, in “ The Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman,” written during 1361-1393, describes the motley crew ” of portours (porters) and pykeporses (pick-purses) and pylede (bald) toth-drawers ” and other disreputable characters. A common pictorial rendering of the toothdrawer shows him engaged on his task while his assistant picks the pocket of his unfortunate patient. Some of the advertisements published by these professional for¬ bears of ours are interesting examples of self-praise, and, to con¬ tinue the proverb, they have little recommendation, yet I suppose they brought considerable grist to the mill. Here is one from the Post Roy, of London, December, 1719 : — ” The widow of the late Dr. Povey, operator for the teeth, now follows the same business; she cleans teeth and puts in Artificial ones so easy, neat and firm that they need not be removed for some years; and they may eat with them as with their former and cannot be distinguished from their natural ones; and (she) sells all his (her late husband’s) Medicines, which she made up for him many years in his life-time . . . She hath a Cephalick which certainly cures the tooth-ach in a minute’s time, beyond any person in England; and she stops hollow Teeth so that the pain will never return again.” Can any practitioner to-day better that? I wonder how she got away with one of those difficult edentulous lower dentures, and what excuse she made if it was not ” so easy, neat and firm that they need not be removed for some years ” ? What sort of a fellow was our toothdrawer then ? If the con¬ temporary pictures which have come down to us do not lie, we find him working away, perhaps in the market-place, with all the theatrical appurtenances of the quack. He has a necklace of teeth around his neck, similar grisly specimens are dangling from a sign¬ board on which his virtues are extolled, and probably he sports a monkey whose grimaces amuse the crowd. Whether this crowd is a convention of the artist I do not know, but one always has the feeling, when looking at these old pictures, that our tooth puller liked an audience. We see the brass bands of Sequah, the dwarfs and negro attendants, the bleeding bowls and other paraphernalia of his craft, and, if practising indoors, the stuffed crocodiles. A
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