ABSTRACT
Having examined the activities of the mountebank drug-seller of the fair, using his act to promote his principal business of the sale of drugs, we should now consider those practitioners who did physically treat teeth in France in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this chapter, it will become apparent that such treatment, consisting princi pally of the removal of diseased teeth rather than their repair, was inextricably linked to the structure of the French surgical profession, from the officially recognized and respected Paris surgeon to the ‘unof ficial’ popular practitioner of the provinces. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, French surgery was becoming highly structured and its practice increasingly regulated as surgeons moved centre-stage in the practice of medicine. In the chapters which follow, this movement and its central role in the making of the dentiste will be examined in more detail; but this chapter will focus on the broad and, to us at any rate, often indistinct picture of those practitioners who could not officially take the title of surgeon but who chose to offer the treatment of teeth as an important part of their practice. In the relatively narrow field which is provided by the activity of treating teeth, we shall see that the boundary between official and unofficial practice is, to our eyes, at best highly mobile and at worst completely non-existent - but again, here we must exercise great care. As noted in the discussion of nomenclature in the introduction to this book, the implications of a title will hinge on the viewpoint of the observer; hence we shall come across examples of surgeons described as charlatans, and charlatans who were apparently officially recognized as surgeons. We shall see that the principal activity of the members of this group was the drawing of teeth, and for this reason I shall describe them as ‘tooth-drawers’; but how can we obtain a clearer view of them and their activities? Where should they sit in the structure of surgical practice in the ancien régime?
