French teeth are something of a speciality for the president of the Royal Historical Society. Colin Jones, who is also a history professor at Queen Mary, University of London, wrote two memorable monographs on the subject.
His study, called Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century Paris, centres on a literally huge Parisian tooth-yanker called Le Grand Thomas. Jones explains that:
“For nearly half a century, from the 1710s to the 1750s, Thomas was a standard fixture, a living legend, plying his dental wares on the Pont Neuf in Paris… If the tooth he was attacking repulsed his assaults he would, it was said, make the individual kneel down, then, with the strength of a bull, lift him three times in the air with his hand clenched on the recalcitrant tooth.”
Jones suggests that a well-informed toothache sufferer, surveying the major healthcare options, might reasonably opt for Le Grand Thomas or one of his many self-taught peers.
Surgeons, the people most likely to do a good job, were enjoying a rise in prestige and fees. They would commonly decline the pedestrian, relatively low-paying task of tooth-pulling. Doctors and apothecaries “were both still primarily hands-off practitioners” whose services might be expensive and whose array of remedies still included things like “the ingestion of flayed, crushed and cooked mouse”….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.