Curious Expeditions' Journal

Painless Parker’s Dental Circus

Show girls, singing and dancing. A band with blasting bugles. A dental chair poised at the ready in the bed of a horse-drawn wagon. And there at the center of it all is Painless Parker, dressed to the nines in his spotless white frock coat and trademark gray brushed-beaver top hat. Around his neck is a long necklace of teeth, 357 teeth to be exact, all pulled, Parker claimed, on one day right from that very chair in his traveling office.

The small but delightful Historical Dental Museum at the Temple University School of Dentistry in Philadelphia has a lovely collection of antique dental student teaching aids. Some of the best items were created by students as part of their graduation requirements and then left behind, like the set of blue wax teeth above. Every student was required to carve a set of teeth like this to demonstrate intimate knowledge of the anatomy of each tooth. The practice ended in the 1970′s, but according to a plaque at the museum, the practice was recently reintroduced.

The collection is incredibly charming and the sense of each item being a tool of practicality that was actually used gives a feeling of purposefulness to each tiny bone-handled instrument. (Take a look at our flickr set from the museum for more the collection.) But above them all, there was one small display that especially caught our eyes.

A plaque reading “PAINLESS PARKER” stands next to a long strand of teeth, and just below that, a large wooden bucket filled to the brim with dirty old teeth. We wondered, what could possibly be educational about a bucket of teeth? It seemed more like a novelty than a teaching aid.

As it turned out, these items had nothing to do with the Temple School of Dentistry, save for the man who owned them; Edgar Randolf Rudolf Parker, who graduated with his class of just 3 other students from the Temple Dentistry School in 1892.

Upon graduating, Edgar R. R. Parker moved back to his hometown in Canada to open his own dental practice. Parker was disappointed to discover that there just wasn’t any business. Even after having a large sign made for his office, he only received one patient; a tourist passing through with a toothache. Parker knew he was a good dentist and couldn’t stand the idea that his practice might never take off, so he decided to take matters into his own hands: he would become the P.T. Barnum of dentistry.

Working in the 1890s during the height of ‘humbugs,’ ‘dime museums’, and rational amusements, Parker did what any natural-born-showman would do. He took a cue from the best and hired one of P.T. Barnam’s ex-managers to help him take his practice on the road. From his horse drawn office, amid his show girls and buglers, Parker promised that he would painlessly extract a rotten tooth for 50 cents. And if the extraction wasn’t painless, he would give the customer $5.00, the equivalent of roughly $115 today. Parker’s band actually served a three way purpose. First it drew a crowd. Second, it distracted the patient whose tooth was being pulled (along with a healthy cup of whiskey or an aqueous solution of cocaine he called “hydrocaine,”) and third, it drowned out any possible moans of pain emitted from a patient.

To help advertise his booming business of tooth pulling, a bucket full of teeth he had personally pulled sat by his feet as he lectured to the crowds on the importance of dental hygiene. Naturally like most showman-practitioners his shameless advertising was looked down upon in the medical community. Around 1915, Parker was ordered to stop advertising himself as “Painless Parker” under the accusation of possible false advertising. Unperturbed, Parker skirted around the issue by legally changing his first name to Painless. No one could tell him not to advertise under his own name.

A blurb on his death in a 1952 Time Magazine’s said that his “ballyhooing techniques and easy professional ethics boomed his practice but outraged his colleagues.”

Though Painless Parker’s blatant advertising pushed the boundaries of respectability and even legality, Parker believed in bringing oral education and affordable services to all walks of life, bringing the dentist to them rather than bringing them to the dentist, and cheap, (and at least usually) painless, tooth extractions. As the plaque at the museum states, “Much of what he championed – patient advocacy, increased access to dental care and advertising – has come to pass in the US.”

For D and I, looking into his bucket of teeth some 58 years after his death, Painless Parker’s ballyhooing, advertising, showgirls, bugles, and even his necklace of teeth doesn’t dismay nearly so much as it delights.