ABSTRACT
Part III considered itinerant medical practice as a whole. Here in Part IV, the focus is on a medical speciality archetypally associated with itinerant healers, because underprovision by sedentary practitioners created a clear market niche, namely dental care. In 1761, Paris, with a population of some 600,000, had thirtythree authorized dental surgeons, including two women.2 In many regions of early modern Europe the officially sanctioned practice of medicine was divided between three groups with radically different training, social standing and gender profiles, all supported by a fourth group, the apothecaries. Some indication of the relative numbers of practitioners is given by statistics of 1783 in Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung. As well as one hundred and sixty-nine midwives and two hundred and twenty-two physicians, the city of Vienna, then with a population of some 200,000, had seventy-nine surgeons, including four specifically registered as dental surgeons.3 The skills of midwifery were, until well into the seventeenth century, overwhelmingly passed on through an informal apprenticeship system, administered by women whose qualifications were officially unrecognized. Thereafter, they were gradually subsumed into male-dominated surgery. In Delft, for example, it was already a requirement for midwives to join the surgeons’ guild by 1656.4 The practice of outer medicine, or surgery, was regarded as a trade, for which a licence was awarded after a formal apprenticeship to a qualified barbersurgeon. University medical courses, open only to men, produced physicians qualified in inner medicine, or physic. Although physicians also commonly and openly exercised skills primarily associated with other categories of health practitioner, they themselves strongly resisted attempts by midwives, surgeons,
1 Various aspects of Part IV were previously considered in Katritzky, ‘Gendering Tooth-drawers’ and ‘Unser sind drey’, where some of these ideas are pursued in greater detail.
