"Extraneous bodies": The contagion of live-tooth transplantation in late-eighteenth-century England

Eighteenth-Century Life

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 21-68

  Blackwell, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HARTFORD   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149734079     PISSN: 00982601     EISSN: 10863192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00982601-28-1-21     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Atul Gawande, "Annals of Medicine: Desperate Measures," New Yorker 79 (5 May 2003): 75
2. For recent discussions of the sale of body parts, see Joanne Silberner, "Organ Transplants for Sale," Morning Edition, NPR (2 Oct. 2002)
3. Madhav Goyal, Ravindra Mehta, Lawrence Schneiderman, and Ashwini Sehgal, "Economic Consequences of Selling a Kidney in India," Journal of the American Medical Association 288.13 (2002): 1589-93
4. And David J. Rothman, "Ethical and Social Consequences of Selling a Kidney," Journal of the American Medical Association ibid., 1640-41
5. On the vogue for tooth transplantation in late-18th-c. England, see John Woodforde, The Strange Story of False Teeth (1968; rep. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 81
6. John Hunter, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Teeth (London, 1778), 95
7. The advertisement to Hunter's Natural History of Human Teeth (London, 1771), the single most important work on tooth transplantation in 18th-c. England, claims that "most of the Observations contained in the following Treatise were made by the Author before the Year 1755."
8. On the emergence of a consumer society in 18th-c. England, see, e.g., Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomingion: Indiana Univ., 1982)
9. And Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ., 1997)
10. On social differentiation in the period, see Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia Univ., 1982)
11. And John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), particularly his "Introduction: Artificers and Gentlemen."
12. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1985), 103
13. "The Sociology of the Body," in The Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology, ed. William C. Cockerham (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 48
14. Discussing varying ideologies of race in the 18th c., Roxann Wheeler acknowledges "the significance Britons placed on the body's exterior, an attention that was especially remarkable in the last two decades of the eighteenth century" (The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2000], 235)
15. The Making of the Dentiste, c. 1650-1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 87, 143
16. Colin Jones, however, expresses some healthy skepticism both about Fauchard's "stark and dichotomous contrast between medicine and quackery" and about recent social historians' equally stark distinction between "popular" and "professional" medicine ("Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century Paris," Past & Present 166 [2000]: 118-21, 133-35)
17. On parallel developments and distinctions in England, see A. S. Hargreaves, White as Whale Bone: Dental Services in Early Modern England (Leeds: Northern Universities, 1998), 39
18. Robert Blake's account of dentistry's origins is in striking harmony with that of modern medical historians: "About the year 1700, the necessity of some artificial mode of preserving the teeth attracted particular attention in Paris, and a few surgeons there began to confine their operations to diseases of the mouth and teeth alone; from which period may be dated the commencement of useful knowledge in that branch, founded on experience. Of those works published on the Continent the best is that by Fauchard. . . . The only treatise of consequence which has appeared in our language is by the celebrated Mr. John Hunter" (An Essay on the Structure and Formation of the Teeth in Man and Various Animals [Dublin, 1801], v)
19. On the publication of dental treatises in France, see King, 198. On the adoption of the word "dentist" in English, see Christine Hillam, Brass Plate and Brazen Impudence: Dental Practice in the Provinces, 1755-1855 (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ., 1991), 9
20. And Hillam, ed., The Roots of Dentistry (London: British Dental Assoc., 1990), 37
21. The same was true of medical practice in general during the 18th c.; consider this excerpt from Auguste Caron's The Lady's Toilette (London, 1808): "The transfusion of the blood, emetic wine, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, inoculation, bark and horse-chestnuts, phosphorus, ice, gelatine, vaccination, &c. &c. have alternately been praised to the skies, as all-healing remedies. To-morrow will give birth to some new process, just in the same manner as La Belle Assemblée will furnish us with new hats and new dresses" (52)
22. And Hunter, Natural History, 117-18
23. The phrase "ornament of the mouth" comes from Nicolas Dubois de Chémant, A Dissertation on Artificial Teeth in General (London, 1797), 6. "Ornament of the face" may be found in Fauchard, 39, and in Tolver, 15
24. See also Etienne Bourdet's appeal to men in Soins faciles pour la propreté de la bouche (Paris, 1771), 5
25. The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; rep., New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 55
26. "Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization," Social Science History 14.1 (1990): 106. Though she is discussing neither the growing importance of the tea ritual nor the vogue for the latest dental treatment, Wheeler's fine-grained distinction between a consumerist hierarchy and differences "of class or color" is apposite: "Consumerism . . . created another kind of hierarchical bond among British subjects based on the emulation of an approved norm. Insufficient consumption of goods or English culture helped delineate differences of station within Britain and the empire" (233)
27. The difference between metropolitan and provincial care was still profound at the turn of the century: "the practice arising from the diseases and other circumstances of the teeth, has of late years become very extensive. . . . The same consideration of their importance, with which the minds of the inhabitants of the metropolis have been impressed, is fast spreading through the country" (Joseph Fox, The Natural History of the Human Teeth [London, 1803], v)
28. Frederic George Stephens and M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires . . . in the British Museum, 11 vols. (London: British Museum, 1870-1954), 6.1:213-14
29. Hogarth: High Art and Low, 1733-1750, 3 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ., 1992), 2:228
30. David Dabydeen notes that blacks are often included in period portraits as a "token of their [masters'] affluence and colonial business interests" (Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century Art [Athens: Univ. of Georgia, 1987], 21)
31. In Memoirs and Adventures of a Flea (London, 1785), when Mrs. Suds the washer-woman yearns for tea-time, the flea editorializes: "Tea-time formerly killed a tedious hour with the polite world. . . . Now it is become of stronger use, it is made an essential requisite, even in the lowest sphere - I mean a requisite for life - for many an honest pains-taking woman could as soon abandon gin and low spirits, as this Chinese vegetable species of idolatry night and morning" (60-61)
32. "Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550-1800" in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 178
33. Also see Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1625-1775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1973), 21-22, 26-27
34. "The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption," in Consumption and the World of Goods, 261
35. See Charlotte Sussman on the abandonment of "the time-consuming preparation of nutritious oat porridge and vegetable stock in favor of the prepared foods made possible by sugar" (Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833 [Stanford: Stanford Univ., 2000], 30)
36. On the paradox of refinement in the 18th c., whereby progress and decadence are inextricably linked, see James Engell, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1989), 55-57
37. Sussman discusses the abolitionists' manipulation during the 1790s of just such an anxiety about the contamination of the national body through a form of cannibalism - that is, via the ingestion of the slave's body, metonymically represented by his bodily fluids (blood, tears, sweat) - as a means of campaigning against sugar consumption by suggesting that imported sugar is tainted both by its association with the horrors of slavery and by its corrupting contact with the foreign body of the slave (115-21). Hillam discusses the provinces' xenophobic resistance to the "French invasion" of the dentist during the second half of the 18th c. in England (Brass Plate, 117)
38. On the English tendency to associate innovative dental practices with the French during this period, and on the prevalence of dental advertisements that include the words "Lately arrived from France," see J. Menzies Campbell, Dentistry Then and Now (Glasgow: Pickering and Inglis, 1963), 192, and n. 10 above
39. Walter Hoffmann-Axthelm, History of Dentistry, trans. H. M. Koehler (Chicago: Quintessence, 1981), 147, 187
40. L'art de conserver les dents (Paris, 1737), 120
41. Recherches et observations sur toutes les parties de l'art du dentiste, 2 vols. (Paris, 1757), 2:193, 198
42. Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death, and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2001), 176
43. "John Hunter and The Natural History of the Human Teeth: Dentistry, Digestion, and the Living Principle," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 49.4 (1994): 506
44. W. F. Bynum writes, "John Hunter, possibly the most gifted experimental biologist of the century, was an avowed vitalist" ("Health, Disease, and Medical Care," in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1980], 223)
45. For more on Hunter's vitalism, see François Duchesneau, "Vitalism in Late Eighteenth-Century Physiology: The Cases of Barthez, Blumenbach, and John Hunter," in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1985), 259-95
46. However, Robert Bunon suggests that dentists and patients prefer young donors because their "Dents toutes neuves" are more likely to be pleasingly white (Essay sur les maladies des dents [Paris, 1743], 206)
47. Fiona Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlands on: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ., 1996), 253
48. Diana Donald notes that "the natural social relationship of charitable donor and recipient" has been reversed here, and that the "moral infection" diagnosed by the engraving can be cured only through a reassertion of the "social distance" that is the corollary of "a system of benevolent paternalism" (The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III [New Haven: Yale Univ., 1996], 97-98)
49. The Politics of Sensibility: Place, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1996), 74-77
50. In The Adventures of an Ostrich Feather of Quality (London, 1812), the second wife of a lord is the sister of a man who ascended from apprenticeship to a "cow-leach" to work on human subjects: "I pretend not to say by what merit he rose to perform the operation of wrenching out a tooth, reducing a collar-bone, or healing a sore finger, on the 'human frame divine;' but he certainly obtained such skill, that he was called The Doctor" (129). Note that crossing the class barrier through marriage and crossing the species barrier through a shift from veterinary to medical pursuits are closely connected here
51. See Laura Brown, "The Orangutang, the Lap Dog, and the Parrot: The Fable of the Nonhuman Being," in Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2001), 221-65
52. The Dramatic Works of John O'Keeffe, Esq., 4 vols. (London, 1798), 4:75
53. Bynum writes, "the pursuit of wealthy and influential patrons by individual doctors" - and, we might add, dentists - "seems to have been a common avenue for establishing one's reputation" (229)
54. Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660-1850 (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 1989), 36
55. Irvine Loudon notes that "Physicians were often mocked for their ostentatious choice of horses, coaches, and coachmen" (Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750-1850 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1986], 123)
56. Dorothy and Roy Porter, Patient's Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 1989), 23, 122-26
57. Such characters are something of a theatrical commonplace in the second half of the 18th c. Samuel Foote's comedy, The Lyar (performed 1762), includes one Papillion, who serves Young Wilding, an Oxford student, as his valet and his guide to fashionable London. Papillion teaches his first lesson - in London, appearances can be misleading - through the example of Dr. Julap, who appears to be a physician but is in fact "an absolute French spy, concealed under the shelter of a huge medicinal perriwig" ([London, 1780], 3); Papillion then reveals that he himself is a Frenchman "from the county of York," that is, an English servant passing as French because "doors dat was shut in your face as footman Anglois, will fly open themselves to a French valet de chambre" (4). Papillion goes on to note that his adopted nationality serves him well when he is out of place: "Why, at a pinch, Sir, I am either a teacher of tongues, a frizeur, a dentist, or a dancing-master; these, Sir, are hereditary professions to Frenchmen" (4, my emphasis). Papillion even contemplates moving to France and purchasing "a marquisate near Paris" when he retires, a possibility that displaces from England to France the anxieties about social and national fluidity with which The Lyar is rife
58. The Pantheonites: A Dramatic Entertainment, As Performed at the Theatre-Royal in the Hay-Market (London, 1773), 20
59. "Britannia's Rule and the It-Narrator" Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6.1 (1993): 68
60. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 1993), 103-34
61. On the distinction between the "experiential, animated, or living body" and the "objective, instrumental, exterior body" see Nettleton, 52
62. Similar questions about who owns a transplanted body part are facetiously raised by Horace Mann in a letter to Horace Walpole dated 15 Oct. 1743. Mann reports that a Prince Craon told a story "about the transplanting of teeth in France from a child's head to that of [a] fine lady's, and wound it up with a woeful circumstance that if the child at any age died, the fine lady was sure immediately to lose her teeth. The audience stared. 'Mais,' dit-il, 'ça est fort naturel. Les dents étaient autrefois à cette autre personne.' With this conclusive argument he satisfied himself and his audience" (Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. [New Haven: Yale Univ., 1937-83], 18:324)
63. Liverpool surgeon-dentist Robert Wooffendale reminds fashion-conscious readers that transplantations often fail "though the transplanting was performed by dentists in London in the most esteem for this operation" (Practical Observations, 134)
64. On the common combination of dentistry with such crafts as watchmaking, jewelry making, snuffbox making, and especially goldsmithing during the 18th c., see Hargreaves 92-95
65. See also Vincenzo Guerini, A History of Dentistry from the Most Ancient Times until the End of the Eighteenth Century (1909; rep., Pound Ridge, New York: Milford House, 1969), 329, and Hoffmann-Axthelm, 222
66. Elsewhere, Hunter writes that mercury, which loosens teeth and affects gums, should not be taken before or after the transplanting of teeth; therefore, "those who have Teeth transplanted, ought particularly to avoid for some time the chance of contracting any complaint, for the cure of which mercury may be necessary" (Practical Treatise, 98)
67. David Charles Schechter asserts that "the clinical transplantation of teeth [was brought] to a virtual halt" in the 1820s and 1830s by the work of James Gardette and, later, Thomas Bell ("The Transplantation of Teeth," Surgery, Gynecology, and Obstetrics 132.2 [1971]: 316-17)