Page 451 - The Secret Museum

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT OF the British Dental Association Museum is a set of tools

that belonged to Queen Victoria’s dentist, Sir Edwin Saunders (1814–1901). He
looked after her royal teeth for 40 years, and must have done a great job, because he
was the first dentist ever to be knighted (in 1883). The tools he used on Queen
Victoria’s teeth are owned privately, I’m not sure who owns them – someone who
likes teeth I suppose. However, I looked inside a box of tools he used to treat another
royal, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII).

The lid of the box is embossed with the Prince of Wales’s feathers. Inside is a
row of tools on a bed of red velvet. They’re pretty fancy, with mother of pearl

handles. Four have crowns and one has a rose, thistle and shamrock. One of them is a
mirror, with a green stone handle. Sir Edwin Saunders kept these decorative tools for
show. When he got to work he would lift up this layer to reveal his real set of tools
below. I did the same. The second set of tools don’t look as flashy, but they must
have got the job done.

The box is surrounded by thousands of other things the museum can’t fit upstairs –
drawers full of false teeth, instruments, toothpaste, toothbrushes, early dentists’
chairs and statues of Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of toothache sufferers.

It was during Victoria’s reign, when Sir Edwin Saunders was working, that the

dentistry profession started to get organized. For the first time you had to be a dentist
to work on people’s teeth. Before that, anyone who fancied it – chemists, blacksmiths
and wigmakers – had a go. People had their teeth pulled out on the village green as
everyone watched. In the 1870s leading dentists, including Sir Edwin Saunders, set
up the Dental Reform Committee to regulate the profession. Dental hospitals were set
up to train dentists and to treat people, and dental tools began to be mass made. There
were faster drills, more fillings and anaesthetics became available. Strangely the

nation’s teeth got worse in the nineteenth century. Most people couldn’t afford
dentists, and only had one toothbrush to share between a whole family.

We take toothbrushes and toothpaste for granted every morning and evening now,
but it took a long time for these basic tools to get into our bathrooms. The very first
toothbrush was the most simple of all – a finger or a twig. Still today in India, neem
tree twigs are popular toothbrushes – people stand around brushing their teeth with
them in the morning; all you do is chew an end of the stick, to make bristles, and then
brush. In Senegal, the chewing stick is called sothiou, which means ‘to clean’ in

Wolof. In East Africa it is called mswaki, the Swahili word for ‘toothbrush’. The
museum has a selection of chewsticks down in the basement.

A businessman named William Addis made the first real toothbrush in 1780. It
was made out of horsehair and bone, so I reckon I would have felt sick if I’d used
one. They were quite popular, but it was the First World War that brought
toothbrushes into everyone’s home. The troops were issued with toothbrushes – some
didn’t know what they were for and used them to clean their boots – but most took
them home to show their families. After that, the idea caught on, Boots and