You know the drill

In his Physiognomische Fragmente, published between 1775 and 1778, the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater insisted that ‘clean, white and well-arranged teeth … [show] a sweet and polished mind and a good and honest heart’, while rotten or misaligned teeth revealed ‘either sickness or else some melange of moral imperfection’. Whatever one might think of the notion that one can read human character directly from the face, Lavater reminds us that dentistry has never been just about teeth. Possession of a functional, pain-free mouth is a practical necessity — we all must breathe and eat and talk — but it is also central to our sense of self. Pain in the head can seem unbearably close to the core of who we are, and stinking breath or black teeth carry a stigma that is both peculiarly personal and entirely public.

Lavater’s text embodies a profound paradox in our attitudes to dentistry, one that lies at the heart of my latest book, The Smile Stealers, and a new exhibition at Wellcome Collection in London. Teeth uses more than 150 objects — cartoons and caricatures, amulets and dental chairs, ivory dentures and drills — to chronicle the shift from heroic and agonising extractions to contemporary preventative dentistry. But it also casts light on a startling series of hidden histories: beauty and ugliness, food and fashion, cultural ideals and individual unease. Ask anyone to list the markers of medical progress, and the odds are that modern dentistry will be high on their list. Ask them to name the most unsettling moments in 20th-century cinema, and they’re likely to recall the notorious scene from Marathon Man, released in 1976, in which Laurence Olivier straps Dustin Hoffman into a dental chair and tries to extract a confession with a pick and a drill.

Societies in most times and places have had specialists to maintain, repair, extract or replace bad teeth — but to call this disparate collection of practitioners ‘dentists’ is to miss the very particular history and meaning of the name.