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

Close examination is recommended

Occasionally things like this happen. Christie's South Kensington are having a sale on 30 June 2010 of Victorian and British Impressionist art (mostly paintings and drawings). Lot 159 (see image on left from the sale catalogue) is a small oil painting on wood (17.8 x 14.6 cm., about two-thirds the size of an A4 sheet). It shows a little girl about to have a tooth removed by a dental surgeon who is concealing the dental pincers behind his back for fear of alarming her. It seems unnecessarily melodramatic, as, given her age, her milk teeth would surely come out anyway, but perhaps she is being given a foretaste of adult dentistry? Christie's have given the painting a "title", which is This won't hurt a bit!, though they don't say whether this was a title that they made up (as often happens) or one given by the artist.

Who was the artist? Well, Christie's say the painting is by Thomas Webster RA (1800-1886), and is signed and (indistinctly) dated "T Webster/1835". Thomas Webster is a famous and much-loved painter, a member of the Cranbrook colony of painters in Kent, and a specialist in genre paintings showing children in relation to adults. If this were a finished painting by him, it would be a valuable commodity, but as it is a small sketch, Christie's have published an estimate of only £800-1,200 for it.

However, a finished and large-scale painting of the same composition does exist: it was offered for sale by the rival firm of Sotheby's in the sale which they organized in 2008 of the collection of Victorian paintings built up by the Foreign Office official Sir David Scott. (The sale was mentioned in an earlier posting on this blog.) In that memorable sale of 19 November 2008, lot 118 was a painting on canvas (61 x 51 cm., or larger than A2), signed and dated "Edward Hughes/1866" (illustration right, from Sotheby's catalogue). It sold for £11,875 including the buyer's premium. Hughes, who was born in 1832 and died in 1908, was a High Victorian painter of the generation after Webster. Apart from portrait-painting, which was his bread-and-butter job, his specialty was painting pictures of the misfortunes of the working classes: Sotheby's cited pictures given the titles "Ruinous prices", "Lone and weary" and "Sorrowful tidings". The dental scene would fit into his oeuvre through its class-based subject matter: the little girl and her mother are expensively dressed, but they have come for the operation to a grubby lower-middle class establishment, where the aproned manual operator is concerned not to upset them.

So what is going on here: was the Sotheby's version a copy by Hughes of an earlier painting by Webster? If so, one would have expected Hughes to have signed it "Edward Hughes after T. Webster" (such signatures acknowledging earlier artists do exist). Or is the Christie's picture a copy by Webster after Hughes? That seems improbable as Webster was the senior man, and the date in the Webster inscription would be impossible, as in 1835 Edward Hughes was a little boy younger than the little girl in the painting (but remember that Christie's say the date is indistinct). The costume looks to this writer more characteristic of 1866 than of 1835, and will remind some people of John Everett Millais's My first sermon of 1863 (illustration left: Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London). That would suggest a Hughes composition.

The deeper story has yet to be unravelled, but if I were thinking of buying the Christie's painting on 30 June, I would look very closely at that Webster signature to see whether the signature might have been added to an unsigned picture. That would normally warrant the catalogue statement "Bears signature" rather than "Signed". Added signatures of famous artists are not uncommon: on the same day as the Christie's auction, the National Gallery in London opens its exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries (30 June-12 September 2010, admission free), where an array of similar "modifications" will be on display.

Oil painting by Luciano Nezzo. Wellcome Library no. 44610i

As the Hughes/Webster composition shows, the surgeon's bedside manner when dealing with impressionable and vulnerable patients offers wonderful opportunities for a skilful narrative painter, and indeed the Wellcome Library has such a painting by Luciano Nezzo (b. 1856). Here it is not a child but a young woman who is facing the terror of a tooth-extraction. Unlike dealers and auction houses, we do not purport to give titles to paintings, drawings etc., but try to interpret the subject through a description in the catalogue record: in the Wellcome Library catalogue the reader will therefore find an attempt to analyse the various polarities that the artist has set out in the painting. This dramatic painting by an Italian artist of the generation after Hughes makes an interesting contrast with the works of the earlier English genre painter. Nezzo's works are rare, but this painting is signed -- and no reason has been adduced for doubting its authenticity.