THOUGH FOUNDED before the Children's and Women's hospitals, the history of Birmingham's Dental Hospital sits more comfortably beside that of the Skin Hospital than other local specialist institutions. Issues of chronology aside, these two institutions share a number of similarities and a common trajectory in their first decades of existence and will therefore be considered jointly in this chapter. To begin with, both of these medical specialties, dentistry and venereology, were for centuries very closely linked to quackery. As such, this chapter additionally offers an example of the way in which two emerging medical specialisms professionalised in the second half of the nineteenth century. Given this shared heritage, medical practitioners associated with these charities often very consciously defined themselves in opposition to their quack forefathers. For example, the founder of the first dental charity in Birmingham regularly contrasted his very aggressive dental techniques with the less invasive and, therefore, ineffectual methods of charlatans and mountebanks, thereby demonstrating the confidence of a new generation of English dental practitioners. However, despite such efforts, many links with these practitioners’ disreputable pasts remained. For example, both institutions were very much reliant on payments from patients for their economic survival, and publications in both fields often continued to read very much like quack advertisements, not scientific texts. Nevertheless, a process of change was very clearly under way, and, by century's close, these two areas of medical specialisation had been largely transformed. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the new status achieved by both the Dental and Skin hospitals, which were officially recognised by Birmingham medical school as teaching hospitals in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

SCALING NEW HEIGHTS: THE DENTAL HOSPITAL

Though appearing very different from Birmingham's other voluntary hospitals, the Dental Hospital shared certain similarities with those institutions whose histories have already been outlined. Established by Samuel Adams Parker in January 1858, nearly a year before a comparable institution was opened in London at Soho Square, its founder equally shared some important similarities with William Sands Cox, the founder of Birmingham's medical school. Not only did both men initially set up their respective institutions at the age of twenty-seven, but, like Cox, Parker relied on the support of some of the town's senior practitioners when first establishing his medical institution.