The Dentist in the Park

You can picture the faces. Visitors to Lincoln Park walk up to a statue, look at it and walk away saying, “Who?”

Many of Chicago’s parks contain monuments that are like that. Humboldt. Schiller. Altgeld, not to name just Germans.

Schiller. A sculpture that stands in a lovely, very prominent spot at the south end of the formal garden of Lincoln Park, near the zoo’s west entrance on Stockton Drive. If you know Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, you know that the choral movement is based on the “Ode to Joy,” though the odds are that’s all you know. If you read the symphony program, you’ve discovered that the “Ode” was written by Schiller, and that’s how it’s so often referred to: “Schiller’s Ode to Joy.”

“Schiller.” No other name. But he did have one. Or several. The statue commemorates German playwright and poet Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805), a near-contemporary of Beethoven. In the 1880s Schiller was much beloved by Germans everywhere, including the large population of Germans in Chicago at the time. They wanted a commemorative, celebratory statue in a park. Lincoln Park had just recently been laid out. So in 1886 representatives of the German community approached the park superintendent to ask for a spot in the park. He told them that they could have any place in the park, other than a few locations set aside for other purposes. Think of trying that today.

Given the ethnic makeup of Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it really isn’t that difficult to understand why we have statues in the parks that commemorate Schiller or Hans Christian Andersen or Columbus (though two Columbus statues might be a bit puzzling) or the Swedish philosopher Swedenborg.

Things get a bit stranger with Greene Vardiman Black, though. Once we get a handle on the pride of the German community, for example, and understand who the poet Schiller was or who Alexander von Humboldt was to them, it’s not so difficult to understand why a statue, a whole park, or both might be part of our city.

But a dentist?

Yes, a dentist. That’s what Greene Vardiman Black was. However, he wasn’t just your ordinary dentist. He radically changed dentistry from the dangerous pursuit it was in America by bringing actual science to the practice.

In what we call the Middle Ages, dentistry was the province of that period’s version of “surgeons” and barbers. As the Wikipedia article on “Barber Surgeons” says (quoting from Roderick McGrew’s 1985 Encyclopedia of Medical History):

“The barber surgeon is one of the most common medical practitioners of medieval Europe – generally charged with looking after soldiers during or after a battle. In this era, surgery was not generally conducted by physicians, but by barbers (who of course had a sharp-bladed razor as an indispensable tool of their profession). In the Middle Ages in Europe barbers would be expected to do anything from cutting hair to amputating limbs. Mortality of surgery at the time was quite high due to loss of blood and infection. Doctors of the Middle Ages thought that taking blood would help cure the patient of sickness so the barber would apply leeches to the patient. Physicians tended to be academics, working in universities, and mostly dealt with patients as an observer or a consultant. They considered surgery to be beneath them.” (1)

The American Dental Association’s timeline of the history of dentistry says that in 1210, “A Guild of Barbers is established in France. Barbers eventually evolve into two groups: surgeons who were educated and trained to perform complex surgical operations; and lay barbers, or barber-surgeons, who performed more routine hygienic services including shaving, bleeding and tooth extraction.” (2) At that time the word from which our “surgeon” derived, chirurgeon, was used. Sometimes practitioners pretended to expertise they did not actually have, to perform miracles, or to have a product that cured many things. They were termed “charlatans.” In our day, one word for them is “quacks,” a word that “comes from the old Dutch word quacksalver – ‘one who quacks (boasts) about the virtue of his salves’.” (3)

But enough of that. Let’s get clinical and, shall we say, medically explicit. If you are easily queasy, skip down two paragraphs to the one that starts with “Greene Vardiman Black.” So: according to medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris, “Dentistry, as we understand it today, didn’t emerge as a licensed profession until the end of the 19th century, although practitioners had been calling themselves dentists since the late 1700s. . . .Until the early 19th century, barber-surgeons performed a variety of services. They lanced abscesses, set bone fractures, picked lice from hair, and even pulled rotten teeth. The tradition of the striped barber’s pole harks back to that era, when it served as an advertisement for their proficiency as bloodletters.” (4)

About that barber’s pole, Harris says, “The barber’s pole originated from the rod that the patient gripped to make their veins bulge, thus making them easier to slice open. A brass ball at the top symbolised the basin that collected the blood. The pole’s red and white stripes represent the bloodied bandages, which would be washed and hung to dry on the rod outside the shop. The bandages would twist in the wind, forming the familiar spiral pattern we see on the barber poles of today.“ (5) All the more reason to be happy that we live in our own time.

Greene Vardiman Black (1836–1915) grew up on a farm near Winchester, Illinois and studied under an older dentist, Dr. J.C. Spear, in the late 1850s, a time when the science of dentistry in America was extremely rudimentary. After the Civil War Black began making important contributions to dentistry. He invented the dental drill, instituted the technique of using nitrous oxide for extracting teeth without causing pain, and developed the method for filling cavities which is still used today. (6) He was the first dean of Northwestern University’s dental school.

Soon after Greene Vardiman Black’s death, the National Dental Association commissioned sculptor Frederick Cleveland Hibbard (1881–1955) to produce the seated bronze figure of Black which is mounted on a limestone bench-like base. Hibbard was a disciple of Lorado Taft and a prolific sculptor. In Chicago we have several of his works, including the Eagle Fountains on Michigan Avenue, the Garden Figure in the Lincoln Park Conservatory and the Union Park monument to Carter Harrison, the five-term Chicago mayor who was assassinated in 1893 while in his fifth term.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries monument unveilings were important social occasions. In keeping with that tradition, the 1918 dedication of the Lincoln Park Greene Vardiman Black monument was attended by 1,500 members of the American Dental Association. The statue was originally placed at the intersection of Clark Street and North Avenue, but was moved in 1950 to make way for a CTA bus turnaround. It is now located at edge of Lincoln Park adjacent to North Astor Street.

So as you walk through Lincoln Park, stop by the G. V. Black memorial and give a silent thank you to the man who made “painless dentistry” and proper fillings possible. If you hate going to the dentist and your only memory is of throbbing in your jaw and the ugly sound of the drill whining on your teeth, go to visit Schiller while listening to the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Nobody, least of all I, will judge you.

NOTES

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon

(2) [http://www.ada.org/en/about-the-ada/ada-history-and-presidents-of-the-ada/ada-history-of-dentistry-timeline

(3) From Science Museum Brought to Life – Exploring the History of Medicine, http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/people/quacks

(4) Quoted in http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/white-knuckle-adventures-in-early-dentistry/

(5) [ http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-lindsey-fitzharris/the-bloody-history-behind-barbers-pole_b_3537716.html[

(6) http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks/lincoln-park/vardiman-greene-black-memorial/ The titling of the statue as “Vardiman Greene Black” is an error.

© Edmund J. McDevitt
February, 2019