A Dentist Who Served in the Civil War

By Hubert B. Herring

When, as a child, I heard grandiose tales of my great-grandfather the dentist, I could have been forgiven for thinking that before he came along, dentistry was like something out of a sepia-toned comic skit, with mallet as sedative and crude pliers for extraction. And his arrival, in my imagination, instantly brought the modern dental office.

But in this case, I was to learn, hyperbole and fact were surprisingly close cousins. For when I mention that fabled ancestor, G. V. Black, to dentists, roles are reversed and their jaws drop (though this has yet to translate into a free root canal). His statue stands in Lincoln Park in Chicago. And the reproduced office of the man considered “the father of modern dentistry” is a central feature of the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore.

The museum, a Smithsonian affiliate, has been open for a decade, but having seen Black’s office years ago when it was at the Smithsonian in Washington, I had not ventured to Baltimore. But a recent, sizable gift from the family of a cousin (a fellow descendant, of course) went to spiff up the Black exhibit, prompting me to make that long-overdue visit. (Naturally, in deference to the occasion — and yes, at my wife’s insistence — I first brushed my teeth thoroughly at our hotel.)

After making our way through a gaggle of preschool children who had yet to know the dentist’s drill, and walking past an intriguing variety of exhibits — George Washington’s dentures, film stars’ smiles, a poster for the 1938 Our Gang short “The Awful Tooth,” fearsome 17th-century instruments, 7th-century Mayan shell implants — we spied a life-size Greene Vardiman Black, in all his bearded, buttoned-up glory, surrounded by his leather dental chair and desk, cabinets of tools (most of which he invented) and elaborate pedal-operated drill (also his creation). An interactive display offered facts and photographs. (Wait! I have that picture, passed down from my mother, but didn’t know who it was. It’s G. V.’s father!)

In that display were the bare bones of a remarkable life: Born in 1836 on an Illinois farm. A mere 20 months of formal schooling. (“The boy with his dog and gun learned more in a day than a teacher taught in a month,” as one biographer put it.) Apprenticed to his brother, a doctor, at 17. Learned all he needed to know — probably just about all there was to know — of dentistry in a few months. Served briefly in the Civil War. Set up shop in Jacksonville, Ill., doing tireless research into all things tooth. (A daughter born there, vintage 1876, became the fearsome grandmother of my youth.) Invention after invention: 102 “cutting instruments,” by one count; silver amalgam for fillings with just the right chemical balance. Joined the faculty of the Northwestern University Dental School in 1891, and in 1897 became its dean.

In one striking photograph, Black is shown in a classroom, with tooth models, three feet tall, arrayed in front of him as teaching tools.

In the mid-19th century, dentistry was all about mending inevitable damage from an eating lifestyle, and it was practiced by pretty much anyone who hung up a shingle. A great part of Black’s legacy was helping to elevate dentistry to a profession and, as he put it in 1896, to shift to “preventive rather than reparative dentistry.” In 1908, two volumes of his “Operative Dentistry” appeared, followed by a third in 1915, the year he died. “For their clarity, illustrations and exhaustive investigation,” a dental journal declared in 1974, “they contain the backbone of dentistry.”

So, yes, he wrenched dentistry into the modern age, but he was far from a modern man in, say, equality of the sexes. Among my artifacts is a pair of elaborate silver candlesticks given to the venerable G. V. at a 1910 banquet at the Congress Hotel in Chicago. A photograph shows a grand ballroom packed with perhaps 400 tuxedo-clad men and not one woman. And in an 1899 letter to my grandmother, then a young bride, he wrote: “A woman’s chief glory is the glory of her husband. Any action of hers that sets him ahead in the world advances her.”

But that’s a quibble. He is an imposing, white-bearded figure in my circa 1913 family photograph, with my 6-year-old mother at his feet. At one point, I’ve read, his beard reached his waist (now that would be an imposing sight from a dental chair). And he was far from one-dimensional — he was said to be an accomplished violinist, cellist and singer, he once built his own boat, he learned French and German to study medical texts, and he taught himself to be ambidextrous by writing two letters simultaneously.

So with all those inventions so widely used for decades, we descendants must be fabulously wealthy, right? Well, no. Black was, by all accounts, mostly indifferent to money and had little interest in patents. Instead of commercializing his alloy for fillings, for instance, he gathered manufacturers, charged a nominal fee to teach them to make the alloy, and left the business details to them. How un-American! Yet it deepens my respect for this tirelessly inventive man.

Hubert B. Herring is an editor at The New York Times. The National Museum of Dentistry is at 31 South Greene Street, Baltimore. Information: (410) 706-0600 or www.dentalmuseum.org.

IMAGE: Liza M. Pohle/National Museum of Dentistry
FATHER OF MODERN DENTISTRY G. V. Black at a marble grinding machine he used to make very thin tooth sections.

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