As RCSI’s new School of Dentistry opens this week, we thought we’d look back at its predecessor.
RCSI has the distinction of creating the first Professorship in Dental Surgery in Ireland or Britain. This was in 1884, when the inaugural appointee was Richard Theodore Stack (1848 – 1909). Curiously, Stack never intended to be a dentist. He had studied medicine at Trinity College, coming first in his class and winning various scholarships, and seemed destined for a glittering medical career – until, that is, a bout of rheumatic fever left him so deaf, at the age of 26, that he could no longer use a stethoscope. He switched his focus, graduating in dentistry from Harvard University in 1877. For the rest of his life, he actively disliked being called ‘Doctor’ – his door-plate, visiting cards and book stamp all read ‘Dentist Stack'.
Dentist Richard Theodore Stack by Walter Osborne (courtesy of the British Dental Association Museum).
Returning to Dublin, Stack joined the city’s sole dental college, the Metropolitan Dental Hospital in Beresford Place. After a time, dissatisfactions with the Metropolitan led Stack and others to found the Dental Hospital of Ireland in 1879, first located at 29 York Street, later moving to Lincoln Place.
The bad old, unregulated days – "Fellow feeling" (1810) courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Until this era, dentistry in Ireland was entirely unregulated. Some surgeons and apothecaries engaged in dental care, but many patients simply brought their toothaches to their local barber or wigmaker or even blacksmith, who did their best (or worst) with the tools of their trade. A similar situation obtained in Britain, where would-be reformers had unfortunately split into rival factions. Ultimately, this led to parliamentary regulation; the Dental Practitioners’ Act (1878). Anyone in already in practice before 22 July that year was allowed to carry on as before, but prospective newcomers would have to earn a specific qualification – which is why RCSI to launched its Licence in Dental Surgery, this country’s first ever dental qualification. Stack’s subsequent professorship underlined the profession’s raised status, the BMJ later noting that his ‘tireless energy and enthusiasm commanded the generous support of his medical and surgical brethren and enabled him to transform the position of the art’.
Advance planning for the diploma – from the Annual Report of the Council (1874).
From
Stack’s time onwards, RCSI educated some 1,600 dentists over the course of the
next 99 years. But in the 1977 the
School was closed by forces beyond its control: the government of the day decided
– in the teeth of RCSI opposition, it should be noted – that the future of Dublin
dental education belonged to Trinity alone (this was part of a wider higher-education
rationalisation strategy that allocated pharmacy to TCD and veterinary medicine
to UCD). But now, 48 years on, with the first
intake of the new School, the story of Dentistry at RCSI is something to smile
about once again.
‘Obituary:
Richard Theodore Stack M.D., F.R.C.S.I.’, British Medical Journal (Dec 1909),
p. 1654.
R.A. Cohen.
‘A general history of dentistry from the 18th century, with special reference
to Irish practitioners’, Irish Journal of Medical Science, vol. 27
(1952), pp. 128 – 35.
Stanley
Gelbier, ‘125 years of developments in dentistry, 1880–2005 Part 2: Law and the
dental profession’, British Dental Journal, vol. 199 (2005), pp. 470 –
73.
Gerard
Kearns, ‘A strong tradition of dentistry’, Journal of the Irish Dental
Association (December 2013/January 2014).
Ronan
Kelly, Every Branch of the Healing Art: A History of the Royal College of
Surgeons in Ireland (2023).
John B.
Lee, The Evolution of a Profession and of its Dental School in Dublin
(1992).