ABSTRACT
Specialists are agreed that ‘the evidence of female tooth-drawers is small’.1 Although little has been written on them, archival documents such as the Bodenburg couple’s handbill (Plate 39) or a record confirming the issue of a licence to practise at the 1781 Leipzig Michaelmas Fair, to ‘Madame Sergelin, a tooth artist’, confirm their existence. 2 A mid-fourteenth-century literary description of dental extraction carried out by two women concerns an amateur effort made outside the sphere of health care. Various tokens of affection requested by Lidia’s lover Pirro include a sound tooth from her elderly husband Nicòstrato’s mouth. Lidia persuades Nicòstrato that one of his teeth is causing bad breath and, citing the brutality of tooth-drawers, warns him against summoning professional help. Instead, using makeshift equipment and brute force, she and her maid Lusca extract a sound tooth from Nicòstrato’s jaw, substituting a rotten one to show him.3 Women offering dental treatment as part of a spectrum of health care include Hiltgen Crosch of Cologne, whose remedies bring home the extent to which healers relied on seasonal plants. In 1592, her summer treatment for toothache consisted of internal application of the juice of specially grown and prepared stinging nettles and external application of a stinging-nettle poultice. In the winter, Crosch relied on the use of a mouthwash prepared from three pieces of a particular tree, harvested ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.4 Apollonia Colombani of Livorno is one of very few early modern professional female dental practitioners about whom more than the scantest details are known. The daughter of a tooth-drawer, she followed his trade in Venice, in partnership with her husband Giuseppe Colombani, a charlatan surgeon who operated under the stage name ‘Alfier Lombardo’. Guiseppe’s autobiography of 1724 revels in quack hyperbole. He claimed to have pulled half a million teeth,
1 Jones, ‘Pulling Teeth’, 126. 2 Wolfenbüttel HAB, Mx209 /18; Rudin, Lebenselixier, 350. 3 Boccaccio, Decameron, Giornata VII, Novella 9. In D’Urfey’s stage adaptation,
Camilla and her maid Crape call in a loquacious surgeon to draw two of Sir Oliver Oldcut’s
and that Apollonia, renowned for her success in difficult cases, had pulled five thousand, in a quarter century of marketplace practice. Then, at Apollonia’s initiative, the couple renounced the deceptions of public quack stages, to pioneer scientific dental techniques and instruments.5
