Robert Walker obtained the King’s Royal Letters Patent for his remedy in 1755. The Drops were “a spirituous tincture of balsam of copaiba, guiacum, and oil of sassafras. These are all substances obtained from various exotic trees and, needless to say, had no impact on venereal diseases.
The following advert appeared in the Chronicle 54 years later in 1816
In the eighteenth century, the Ton flocked to fashionable resorts like Bath and the sex industry that grew up to serve it; venereal diseases were a constant threat. There was no effective cure, but a lot of money could be made from offering quack medicine to its frightened victims. It was particularly easy to do because most forms of VD have some period of apparent remission.
Mrs Clay, in Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, uses Gowland solution lotion to 'carry away her freckles'. Developed by apothecary John Gowland, this lotion first attained fame in 1743 when Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, began to suffer eruptions on her face after acquiring syphilis from her husband and commissioned Gowland for a remedy. The main ingredient in Gowland’s Lotion was mercury, the common eighteenth-century treatment for syphilis and so repaired lesions and marks of venereal disease on the complexion.
Strongly associated with London fashions, tastes and social aspirations, dentistry became a medical phenomenon in Georgian England. Teeth were central to the eighteenth-century idea of beauty and health, establishing dentistry as a cosmetic necessity, as it has become again in the twenty-first century both Georgian and modern dentist featuring teeth whitening procedures. In An Appendage to the Toilet: or an Essay on the Management of the Teeth, Dedicated to the Ladies, written in 1798, the author complains that women are “daily robbed of an essential part of their beauty by imprudence or neglect in the management of their teeth.” Not only were the results of syphilis and other STDs disfiguring, but the mercurial and salivation treatments used to combat them left most sufferers with putrid gums and rotted, missing teeth. Thus, as women strived to improve or maintain their looks and avoid suspicions that they might be diseased, they were sometimes driven to the extremely costly and controversial practice of dental transplantation. This entailed the extraction of teeth from poor donors willing to trade healthy teeth for cash and the transplantation of those teeth into the damaged and diseased gums of the wealthy patient.
Ironically, John Hunter, in his Treatise on the Venereal Disease, records several instances of the communication of secondary syphilis through tooth transplantation, confirming “the edge of the gums began to ulcerate, and the ulceration when on until the tooth dropped out.”
The essayist Vicesimus Knox wrote a piece entitled “On Injuring the Health in attempts to Improve Beauty,” in which he relates the experiences of a woman who found a cavity in one of her front teeth and sought the help of a dentist.
'Any thing on earth was tolerable in comparison with a cavity. Nay, I know not whether...I should not have submitted cheerfully to death, rather than have lived with a black speck on a front tooth...The remedy was transplantation. I submitted to extraction with a stoical heroism. A chimney sweeper, who attended at my side, parted with his best tooth for a shilling, and it was planted reeking with blood and warm with life, in the socket whence my odious tooth with the black speck had just been drawn. I was now in a state of exultation. I thought my gums might defy old age and decay, and gloried in the idea of having almost found out the art of rejuvenescence. My triumph was but transient....as an inflammation ensued. Upon inquiry, that the person whose tooth had been placed in my gums, was laboring under a complication of the filthiest of diseases, and that the tooth inoculated them all on me. I have heard I am not the only victim to such follies and unnatural practices. I understand the transplanting of teeth is dangerous, even when the person from whom it is taken is healthy; but is it likely that a healthy and temperate person would part with his teeth for money? He who can submit to this, must be an abject wretch.'
This print is by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) and is dated 1787. It is a satirical comment upon the real practice of wealthy gentlemen and ladies of the 18th century paying for teeth to be pulled from poor children and transplanted in their gums. The dentist present is portrayed as a quack. There are even two quacking ducks on the placard advertising his fake credentials. He is busy pulling teeth from the mouth of a poor young chimney sweep. Covered in soot and exhausted, he slumps in a chair. Meanwhile, the dentist's assistant transplants a tooth into a fashionably dressed young lady's mouth. Two children can be seen leaving the room clutching their faces and obviously in pain from having their teeth extracted. [1]
That this practice was followed in Bath is confirmed by an advert in the Bath Chronicle 21 February 1788 inserted by Mr Charlton, surgeon-dentist who was operating, for the season, out of the premises of the stay maker Mr Brickman at 5 Lower Church Street here among other service he 'transplants human teeth in a peculiar method, without the least danger to patients as he will fully convince them before the operation.'
1.Osborn, Melanie Erin. "The Bitter Relicks of My Flame: The Embodiment of Venereal Disease
and Prostitution in the Novels of Jane Austen." 2012.
