Breaking News - Three Little Pigs Arrested

Passing the Guardian Offices the other day I spotted the three little pigs and the wolf. What is this all about? seems it is part of the Guardian's advertising campaign for open journalism.
The video clip is a fun watch here.

Do the English really have bad teeth?

While looking for interesting items from our collections to show a visiting group of dental professionals, I came across these examples of dentists’ advertising cards in our Ephemera Collection.




All dating from around the early 1900s, they demonstrate an intriguing persistence in design. A young woman is depicted in ‘before and after’ shots in which her blackened teeth are transformed into a perfect smile. In two of the cards the pictures are helpfully labelled to reassure you that the dentist will restore you smile, not leave you toothless. The design becomes faintly ridiculous when it is applied to a photograph where the blackened teeth are obviously faked.


Apart from the glimpse of advertising in its unsophisticated infancy, the cards also offer an interesting comment on the fashion of the time. The hair, jewellery and dress of the young women is virtually identical in all three cards, and one wonders if they might have been modelled on some famous beauty of the time?

The other thing that caught my eye was the reference to American dentistry (viz. “American Dental Association” and the “American Dental Co”) in the names of English dental practices. Investigating the dental ephemera material further, I found other references to American dentistry from the 1890s. London based dentist J. Shipley Slipper [1] recalls that:

“an American dissenting minister called upon me yesterday… if he had been an Englishman he wouldn’t have had a tooth left in his head. As it was he had nearly all of them, only they had been stopped”.

And an American dentist also based in London, Dr Edwin L. Shattuck produced a booklet [2], in which he noted that:

“The British public seem generally left far and away behind other countries and especially America as regards [dentistry]. The present uphill struggle is due to the antagonism of old-fashioned English dentists who are content with the old systems laid down by their fathers and probably their grandfathers.”

A little historical research reveals that the high regard for American dentistry in the UK around this time goes back to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, when American dentists won top honours for their displays of artificial teeth, crowns and bridgework. At the end of the nineteenth century there were nine dental colleges in the United States, in Europe there were none [3]. The term ‘American Dentistry’ then, became synonymous with modern practices and high quality procedures, resulting in the many American style practitioners at the turn of the century, many of whom had little or no connection to American training. Dr Shattuck warns of this in his booklet:

“I warn patients against all so-called American dentists whose qualifications will not bear the light of day. It was possible some years ago for Englishmen to obtain a sham degree from America for the large sum of $10... styling themselves ‘American dentists’".

It’s fascinating how ideas persist in societies, long after the original circumstances have disappeared or been forgotten. It would seem that those jokes in American films and TV programmes about the English having bad teeth might have had some basis in truth, at least at the end of the nineteenth century when American Dentistry became mark of high quality, even amongst the English.

[1] A Brief Treatise on English and American Dentistry, 1890
[2] A Few Remarks on Modern and American Dentistry, c.1890
[3] Wynbrandt, James, The Excruciating History of Dentistry, 1998

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Channel 4 abortion ad: part of a long history

When Marie Stopes (1882-1958) first began her crusade for birth control and better sexual knowledge, she was horrified to discover that a significant proportion of the correspondence she received following the publication of her books Married Love and Wise Parenthood in 1918 consisted of requests for the termination of a pregnancy already begun, rather than the prevention of potential pregnancies. A similar phenomenon greeted the opening of her Mothers’ Clinic in Upper Holloway, London, in 1921. Desperate women (and some men) sought her advice on how to intervene in suspected or confirmed conception.

In her public statements, Stopes was adamant that birth control was nothing to do with abortion and that wider knowledge of sound methods of contraception would obviate the large number of abortions. As abortion, even by medical professionals was illegal at that date, and often conducted in dangerous and unhygienic circumstances, this was the strategic line to take. She also endeavoured to pursue with legal force the manufacturers of supposedly abortifacient pills who used her name in their advertisements.

However, in private correspondence with specific individuals, Stopes was sometimes more sympathetic. In cases where a delayed period was causing anxiety, she occasionally advocated the use of Widow Welch’s Female Pills, as an emmenagogue. In a few cases which seemed to her particularly deserving, she was prepared to go further and recommend ‘evacuation of the uterus’ and even to pass on the name of doctors who were known to be prepared to perform abortions (usually for a price).

This prudent line was continued by the National Birth Control Association (subsequently the Family Planning Association) when it was established to coordinate the activities of the various groups running clinics or lobbying the government for legislation to permit birth control advice in local authority welfare centres. There is some evidence from oral history that in at least some clinics, the workers were prepared to assist in procuring abortions by qualified medical personnel. But since abortion was still illegal (even if performed by a registered medical practitioner) this would not be recorded at the time.

During the 1930s awareness was growing of the high level of ‘backstreet’ abortion either self-induced by women or performed by some local person known to ‘help out’, with their significant death and morbidity rate. There was also a widespread belief that wealthy women were catered to by profiteering Harley Street doctors prepared to risk the law for a good price. There were increasing calls for a reform in the law and in 1936 an Abortion Law Reform Association was established.

In spite of the severe constraints upon advertising its presence and the difficulties it faced in setting up clinics, the birth control movement continued to expand quietly throughout the 1940s and 1950s, although contraceptive services were not included in the National Health Service when it was set up in 1948. The Family Planning Association remained the main provider of these, though it also trained general practitioners who wanted to develop these skills.

During the 1960s birth control gradually became a more respectable cause. The Pill was introduced in the early 60s, and in 1967 the Labour Government finally passed legislation permitting, but not requiring, local health authorities to provide free contraception. In the same year Liberal MP David Steel’s Private Members Bill for abortion law reform was finally passed, with significant support from the Abortion Law Reform Association. This had been given a new lease of life when the thalidomide scandal revealed that it had been legal to prescribe this drug but that it remained illegal for a pregnancy affected by it to be terminated.

For many decades London Underground had refused to carry even the most discreet advertisements for FPA clinics, but by the 1970s posters advertising the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, a non-profit abortion provider, began to be seen along the sides of the escalators.

Television commercials for contraception lagged significantly behind. It was only with the advent of the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the 1980s that advertising for condoms, previously very discreet, became more high profile.

It is therefore remarkable that at last, nearly ninety years since Stopes opened the first birth control clinic in the UK, eighty years since the Ministry of Health first permitted the giving of contraceptive advice in maternal welfare clinics to women whose lives were threatened by another pregnancy, that there is at least a strong possibility that an advertisement for abortion advisory services by the sexual health charity Marie Stopes International - based in the Whitfield St London WC1 premises to which Stopes moved her own clinic in 1926 – may finally appear on television.
This story of the long slow road to visibility and acceptability of the right to control reproduction is reflected in numerous collections in Archives and Manuscripts in the Wellcome Library. We hold a large collection of Marie Stopes’ own papers (including thousands of letters from her readers); the archives of the Family Planning Association and of the Abortion Law Reform Association; and even a small group of surviving papers of the Widow Welch’s Pills company. An overview of our copious holdings relating to birth control can be found here. The Library also holds numerous relevant published works and ephemera.

The Carbolic Smoke Ball

Pictured left is an advertisement for the Carbolic Smoke Ball, which on first impression appears a standard piece of late-Victorian medical ephemera, with little relevance to how we live our lives today.

However, this week’s episode of The Cases that Changed the World on BBC Radio 4 describes the groundbreaking legal case which resulted when the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company’s claims for the efficacy of their product were challenged in court; a case which established important principles about truth in advertising and – arguably – led to the birth of modern consumer protection.

The episode is available for listeners in the UK through the BBC’s iPlayer. A detailed description of the case is available on the BBC News website, where the Carbolic Smoke Ball story is described as: “...an odd tale set against the backdrop of the swirling mists and fog of Victorian London, a terrifying Russian flu pandemic, and a forest of unregulated quack medicines offering cures for just about everything”.