The dentures in the collection range from finely crafted porcelain to ingenious improvisations. One pair belonged to Francis Wharton, who shot a deer, filed down its teeth and set them into plastic wood to fashion his own prosthesis. “Apparently, they did not fit very well, so he didn’t use them for very long,” McGowan says. “But he ate the deer with its own teeth.” This upper denture was made by Francis Wharton in 1967 using deer teeth ground to shape and set using household cement into a plastic-wood plate molded to his palate. Other artifacts capture the changing materials of dentistry: gold foil mallets used to shape fillings, extracted human teeth once destined for dentures and vulcanite bases that democratized tooth replacement by offering an affordable alternative to metal. The collection also reveals the evolution of dental marketing. A glass bottle of Rubifoam, a crimson tooth cleaner marketed with a smiling child, invokes both familiarity and strangeness in the viewer. “In some ways it really matches modern advertising,” McGowan says. “We’ve got a cute child and toothbrush in the branding. But the product itself is red, which is not really a colour we think of for cleaning teeth.” Dentists and the Birth of Anesthesia For centuries, opium was one of the few tools available to dull pain during medical or dental procedures. Ancient texts from Mesopotamia and Greece describe its use for easing suffering. In the pre-anesthetic era, opium was given orally or as the tincture laudanum before surgery or tooth extraction.But opium did not render a patient unconscious or insensible to pain. At best, it made procedures more bearable. In 1844, Connecticut dentist Dr. Horace Wells watched a demonstration of nitrous oxide and realized that people under its influence felt no pain. The next day, he had his own tooth painlessly extracted under nitrous oxide. Dr. Wells began using it routinely on patients. Two years later, another dentist, Dr. William Morton, introduced ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Morton’s public demonstration is often credited as the breakthrough that convinced surgeons and physicians of anesthesia’s potential, but it built directly on Dr. Wells’ insight. Dentistry’s early adoption showed that anesthesia could be safe and effective. 24 | 2026 | Issue 1 Issues and People
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