DENTAL HISTORY


The general’s toothache


Jim Killgore recounts a curious First World War tale involving a flamboyant dentist, his motor car and the eventual establishment of the Royal Army Dental Corps


I


N July of last year a rather exquisite automobile came up for auction at Bonhams. A 1913 Rolls-Royce ‘Silver


Ghost’ London-to-Edinburgh Tourer – in mint condition – sold for £718,300. Apart from its rarity, what also made this


car special was a well-deserved footnote in World War One history – and most particularly in the eventual establishment of the Royal Army Dental Corps (RADC). Te Silver Ghost was first owned by a


wealthy Londoner but later sold in October 1915 to Charles Auguste Valadier, a flamboyant dental surgeon working in Paris. Valadier was born in the city in 1873 but was taken as a boy to live in America where he became a naturalised citizen. Later he attended Philadelphia Dental College and qualified DDS in 1901. He practised in New York City for a number of years before returning to Paris in 1910 to study at the Ecole Odontotechnique de Paris and earned the certificate of Chirurgien Dentiste from the Faculty of Medicine of Paris University. Soon he was married and settled and operating a successful dental practice. At the outbreak of war in 1914 Valadier


was keen to offer his skills as a dental surgeon to the French army but was rejected, not being a national. So he approached the British Red Cross Society in Paris who accepted his services and sent him to the town of Abbeville on the River Somme near the front. Here the tale takes a curious turn.


The army that bites In August of that year, aſter the declaration of war, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) landed in France eager to fight. Sailing across the English Channel with the BEF


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over 70 per cent of British recruits were in need of dental treatment. It was inevitable that many soldiers in the field would suffer from a variety of dental ailments – and not just infantry men in the trenches but also officers. So it happened that in October 1914 General Douglas Haig was said to have developed a severe toothache while commanding First Corps of the BEF around the time of the First Battle of Ypres. Finding that there was no dentist available in the British Army to offer treatment, word was sent to Paris to summon a French dentist. Tat dentist is thought to have been none


were elements of the Royal Army Medical Corps but not a single dental surgeon. Tis is curious considering the British Army’s experiences in the Boer War when over 2,000 soldiers had to be evacuated back to the UK on dental grounds and almost 5,000 declared unfit for duty due to a lack of dentures. Te old adage being: “an army that cannot bite, cannot fight”. Te state of general dental health in 1914


Britain had much improved over the previous century but it was estimated that at the time


other than Charles Valadier. Later that same month he was formally accepted for duty with the BEF making him the first dental surgeon to provide treatment officially for British troops serving in France. It’s also perhaps no coincidence that in the November aſter General Haig suffered his toothache, 12 dental surgeons arrived in France from the War Office having been given temporary commissions with the Royal Army Medical Corps. And this was only the beginning. Te importance of having an army that bites had again been recognised. Numbers gradually increased to 463 in December 1916 and then year-on-year until a total of 849 dentists were serving at the time of the Armistice in 1918.


Glittering spurs Early in 1915 a young British ENT surgeon with the RAMC named Harold Delf Gillies was sent to France to work with Valadier who had organised a new medical unit to help treat the growing number of soldiers suffering serious facial trauma. Medicine had never before seen traumatic injury on such a scale. Trench warfare and


PHOTOGRAPH: BONHAMS


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