Dentists Dealing with a broken or rotten tooth used to be a very painful business. There was often nothing for it but to have the tooth yanked out, by force, without an anaesthetic. There were ways of extracting a tooth with a piece of string but sometimes you had to wait for a travelling “tooth-drawer”. They turned up at fairs, making sure that there was a lot of noise going on round them while they put their pliers to work. Imagine listening to a victim’s screams while you were waiting your turn! An elderly woman born and brought up in Winster remembers her grandmother saying how people used to sell their teeth before they had finished with them. You could earn sixpence (2.5p) or perhaps a shilling (5p) for a perfectly good tooth. It would be extracted and given a new home in the mouth of someone much better off. People tried all sorts of remedies for toothache. Seventeenth-century sufferers rubbed their gums with a compound of honeysuckle flowers, honey, ginger and pepper. Some people swore by clove oil, others preferred cotton wool soaked in whisky and packed round the tooth. A dried cat’s skin was kept in some homes, to be held against the cheek during a bout of tooth-ache. A hundred years ago, many doctors carried out dentistry work as well. Henry Bowman Shepherd of Castleton could be consulted as “surgeon, medical officer, public vaccinator” and “extractor of teeth”. More recently, dentists used to hold weekly surgeries in different villages. During the 1920s, George Morton, “artificial teeth fitter” held consultations on Thursday afternoons in a room on Station Road at Hathersage. The front room of a house at Youlgreave was used on Friday afternoons by dentist Mr Humphrey of Bakewell. The lady of the house earned two shillings a week for cleaning up afterwards. More Pictures Health and Sickness