ABSTRACT
We can see that the picture of the theory and practice of surgery, as viewed through publications and lectures, is starting to change as we look at the early decades of the eighteenth century, with the image of the surgical treatment of teeth fading from our view of the activities of the ‘general’ surgeon. We shall find that an examination of those books which would now deal with the treatment of the mouth and teeth will reveal a new type of surgeon, choosing to treat teeth alone, whose pres ence we have begun to perceive on the margins of this picture. Thus, while the operations for the teeth and the methods of treating their diseases were indeed disappearing from the ‘general’ surgical book, the first of what would become a large number of publications on this particular aspect of surgery alone was now emerging. We shall see that such books were not written by experts or arracheurs who were climbing up the hierarchical ladder in an attempt to align themselves with sur geons, as the traditional story implies. They were written by members of a new group of ‘particular’ surgeons1 who, while retaining the implica tions of their surgical title, would declare their particular interest in the teeth, and the celebration of that interest, by assuming the new title of chirurgien dentiste2 - in other words, the appropriated word in this title was dentiste and not chirurgien. But who were these new, ‘particular’ surgeons? Who was writing about teeth in this way, and why were they doing so? The first, and most visible to the modern historian, was the Parisian surgeon Pierre Fauchard whose book, entitled Le Chirurgien Dentiste, ou Traité des Dents, was first published in 1728.3
Fauchard’s Le Chirurgien Dentiste is an extremely full and detailed account of the practice of a Parisian surgeon who chose to focus on the treatment of teeth at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, his writing reveals a wide-ranging vision of the treatment of teeth, built on a broad theoretical base and wide personal experience. While many writers of traditional dental history have looked closely at the way in which Fauchard treated teeth, his writing has not hitherto been used as a resource for an analysis of technical innovation. Rather, it has been taken by such writers to be a resource for the study of the
origins of ‘scientific dentistry’4 and, as I shall show in this chapter, such a statement is intrinsically accurate; but not as such people mean, for the meaning of the words has changed. Rather than the implied applica tion of modern science (as deduction from experimentation) to something that was already being done (dentistry), we shall see that analysis of this extremely valuable resource will help to reveal the practice of the dentiste as having been built on a science, a body of theoretical knowledge founded on fundamental principles, and to reveal the way in which that building was effected. We shall also see that it was the first book of any kind on dentistry.
