July 1, 2021 • 48 mins
Edgar Parker, later better known as "Painless Parker," wasn't your ordinary dentist. When his first practice was struggling in 1892, he began to think outside of the figurative box, combining dentistry, showbiz and public spectacle in a way that'd never been done before, including making dentistry part of an actual traveling circus.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super
producer Casey Pegrum. Shout out to our super producer, the
one and only Max Williams. I'm ben. I guess I
should I should come clean. I put off some dental
work during the pandemic. And when I when I came
(00:48):
back to the dentist chair, who was the trip man? Well,
I put on some weight during the pandemic. Is that
the same thing? No, I know it's not, but it's
common right. People let things go during these quarantine times,
and dental work certainly is one of them. I think
we don't remember which show was on, but we've talked
recently about I'm no by the way, uh dentals, I
(01:10):
know what it was. It was. We did a stuff
that I want you to know episode recently about the
kind of weird world of dentistry fraud, which is kind
of a thing, and this sort of rolls into that
there's some dentistry fraud going on in today's story, but
also some weird historical, kind of positive things that came
from this fraud. What are we talking about. We're talking
about the life of a dude named Painless Parker. That
(01:35):
was not his Christian name. We'll get to that. His
name is Edgar Parker. That's what he was born in
eighteen seventy two. As but yeah, this guy was basically
what you might call a circus dentist. What does that mean, Well,
we'll tell you, yes, circus dentist. And and it's a phrase.
We can back up this This entire this entire circus
(02:00):
uh comes about because when Parker opens his practice back
in two it's not an immediate hit. His business is
struggling a little bit, and so he figures he has
to do something else and he starts thinking outside of
the box. That's what leads us to real life dental circus.
(02:23):
As we dive into the story, I want to point
out we're getting a lot of this information from several sources.
Smithsonian Magazine in particular, with the great title remember when
teeth pulling was fun? As well as Mental floss and
the Santa Cruz Sentinel. That's right, there's also a New
York Times article. Was Painless Parker a vaudeville joke or
(02:44):
a real Brooklyn Dentist by Michael Pollock and a series
of books written by Peter M. Pointage and Art N. G. Kristen,
who are dental historians. Um, just wanted to knock that
out here at the top, but yeah, it's true, Ben Um.
So this guy, Edgar Parker, he studied dentistry at what
today is Temple University. He was born in New Brunswick, Canada,
(03:08):
in the town of Tynemouth Creek, which is on the
shores there of New Brunswick, Canada. Edgar Rudolph Randolph Parker.
He's got a Rudolph and a Randolph there just to
just to be safe. But his family was very religious
and he was he entered into initially for school Baptist
seminary at St. Martin's and he was he was actually
(03:31):
expelled for what was referred to as un christian like behavior. Um.
He had also spent some time as a sailor and
apparently cursed like one while in seminary. That that is,
that is my conjecture there. But I can only imagine
what the sailor like behavior that led to him being
expelled from seminary might have been. Anything really could have
(03:52):
been the jokes, right right, Maybe, I mean, yeah, there
there are a lot of things that would have sounded
absolutely normal to us in that may have been you know,
absolutely scandalous for him to say during this time. So
he he is terrified of going back home to his
(04:14):
folks and saying I got kicked out of seminary. Instead,
he becomes. Instead, he discovers his hustle, and it's a
hustle that'll have for the rest of his life. He
becomes a door to door salesman, and his boss directs
him to never like never leave people alone until they
buy something from him, and his father eventually catches up
(04:39):
with him eight nine. He is not over the moon
that his son has become a door to door salesman
rather than a preacher, so he drags him home. Kids
seventeen years old, runs away again, goes to see catches
dan gay fever. He's dropped off in Barbadosrhe right, that's
(05:00):
it's like the dangay fever. Uh that you may be
thinking of dysenterry Maybe what's but I thought dangay fever
had something to do with like he can give you
bleeding flu like symptoms and rashes. Okay, okay, so no, no,
not necessarily the direa. Sorry, thank you for setting me
(05:20):
straight back. He's he's now stricken with this unfortunate illness
while in the midst of trying to get his life
back together, I imagine, right, yeah, and the doctors who
are taking care of him impress him. You know. He
feels like they saved his life. He feels like this
maybe the most important vocation in the world. And so
(05:42):
when he gets back from another misadventure, he asked his parents, Hey,
can I can I be a doctor? I think that's
you know, I think that's my path forward in life.
But what does what does his folks do? Well, they
were not a family of particular means. They thought it
was a little price to go to medical school, but
(06:02):
they figured they could, you know, spring for the next
best thing, which was sort of an emerging feel at
the time, the field of dentistry um, which he later
according to a fabulous article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel
in Santa Cruz, they also spent some time. There's going
to come up in our story soon. He referred to
it as the noble tooth plumbing profession, plumb the depths
(06:25):
of of the Noble tooth Um, so he enrolled at
an initially New York College of Dentistry. He again didn't
have very much money. He had just enough to pay
for tuition, but didn't really have enough to eat, so
he kind of had to figure out a side hustle
to to make ends meet. And so he I don't
know if we've mentioned this, but the school of traveling
(06:47):
salesmanship that he ascribed to was sort of that like
stick your foot in the door and don't take no
for an answer situation. So he essentially adapted that mentality
to a door to door dental practice. US Before he
had even gotten his credentials, which was very common at
the time, many of the dentists that were practicing were
(07:07):
unlicensed because there really wasn't a whole lot of official
oversight yet because it was a relatively new field and
preventative dental care was really practically a non existent thing.
So he ends up going to Philadelphia Dental College next.
(07:27):
This is prestigious. This is the second oldest school of
its sort in the country. And you know, as you said, Noel,
that's now known as the Temple University Maurice H. Kornberg
School of dentistry. Santa Cruz Sentinel asked the dean of
the college, Dr amid Ismail, how Parker was during his
(07:52):
time there, and he said Parker was a terrible student
and that he only graduated because he literally begged the
dean at that time to pass him, which I didn't
know you could do. Yeah, it seems like this is
a very tender hearted dean, you know to be says
I've I've I've never gotten out of any uh college
(08:14):
failures by begging I or or maybe this guy's gift
of oration was just so profound that it worked. He's
been door to door, he was almost ah, well, he
was almost a preacher, So maybe just leveraged those skills. Anyway,
fast forward, he's twenty years old. He graduates, as he said,
(08:37):
eight nine ninety two, the same year he opens his practice.
He returns home and he thinks, Okay, I'm gonna do
things differently. I'm an innovator. He's saying to himself, what
is he? What does he innovator? First? Well, first of all,
(08:58):
I want to point out one thing that I think
is really fascinating about his time as a as a
door to door dentist, and by the way. He also
opened up his very first office before he even finished
dental school properly, like on seventeenth and Broadway in New York.
But when he found a procedure that he didn't have
the skills to perform, he promised to come back later.
(09:21):
And the indication there was that, you know, once he
got to that chapter in the in the textbook that
he was studying, because again, very very early, not a
whole lot of technology really involved in dentistry and certainly
not very effective pain management, you know, medications and in
the like. Um so, yeah, we've got him finally getting
(09:44):
out of school at the age of twenty in eighteen
ninety two. He comes home, he hooks up with a druggist,
a guy by the name of George Mallory. And I
think you're talking about innovations, Ben, and I was talking
about the lack of pain medication. We don't have no
vacane yet for quite some time, but we you may
(10:06):
know that cocaine was a hell of a drug then
as well as it is today, and was used in
the dental profession. It was actually used for quite some time.
Uh they called a pharmaceutical grade cocaine and it was
something that um you would find in dental offices, maybe
even as recently as the nineteen eighties. But he and
George Mallory, the druggist, tinkered around with a formula and
(10:29):
ended up with a deluded solution of cocaine that they
called hydrocane, and it is considered the kind of precursor
to novocaine. And it was a very very modern innovation
for the time. And so it came to pass that
Parker was prepared to be on like the bleeding edge
(10:53):
of dentistry. But as I said, at the very top,
nobody showed up to his job. It was like the
nicest restaurant that no one ate at. And so he
was worried that maybe some maybe there are hints that
maybe his reputation for being kicked out a seminary had
(11:17):
something to do with this, or maybe that was just
all in his mind. He said, Okay, I've got either way.
He decided he's got to be embedded in the culture.
He's got to be embedded in the society around him,
rather right, because usually people like to work with folks
they already know. So he starts going to church, not
just on Sundays, but twice on Sundays. He's trying to
(11:40):
really show out. You know, he wants to be the
honor student of the church. I guess he's sitting right
in the front. He's seeing a passing the collection plate.
He's got a huge bible that he carries around everywhere.
But no one, no one goes to his practice. There
are other dentists around, or they are just a fraid
(12:00):
of dentists. His profits after three months are something abominably low,
like seventy five cents. And he goes to his pal
Mallory and he's like, Hey, what the heck man and
Matt we're paraphrasing. Mallory says, Oh, you know, people are
afraid of dentists. If they find when they trust, they
stick with him and the town's long established dentists, the
(12:23):
cornered the market. And that's part of what we're talking about,
the stuff they don't want you to know episode because
it can be an inherently uncomfortable proposition to trust people
have for dentists they know can be pretty powerful. Yeah,
that's true. I mean, even though like most of the
work is done by hygienis that kind of rotate in
and out. I mean, I guess some have like a
smaller staff, but that matters, that final little inspection, you know,
(12:46):
from the dentist there, like, you know, the main procedure
they kind of give their sign off on, even if
they're not the actual ones digging around in your mouth
the whole time. Um, that relationship matters. And I think
that's something that Parker really understood that they He needed
to find a way to kind of take the fear
out of dentistry, and he he did a thing that
(13:07):
was probably the most bizarre and extreme version of that
proposition that I could imagine. And by the way, I
want to give huge thanks and credit to the Santa
Cruz Sentinel author ross Eric Gibson Um for a very
very cool article in the paper called Painless Parker and
the Showmanship of dentistry. And that showmanship evolved, but it
(13:28):
began with something quite simple. The idea of soliciting patients
at the time was considered unethical. It's real catch twenty two.
It's really interesting, right, I've got no patience, No one
knows about me. My competition is is is cornered the market,
(13:51):
and yet it's unethical for me to solicit or to
advertise for my practice. But he decided, you know what,
screw it. I'm in the rock and a hard place,
like you said, and I am going to put myself
out there, and he dubbed himself. He gave himself a
moniker that he thought would really sell his practice, and
that was the name Painless Parker. Because at the time
(14:13):
these offices or these practices were called dental parlors. They
were again mostly staffed by unlicensed dentists, and they were
pretty unsanitary. There wasn't any standard of sanitation or sterilization yet,
and this stuff was painful. They didn't have his water
(14:35):
down cocaine solution. I don't imagine um. So he figured
that Painless Moniker was really going to get people in
the door. And he claimed that he could extract a
tooth for fifty cents and it would be painless, and
then if it wasn't, he would pay the patient five dollars,
five dollars that he admittedly did not have. So yeah,
(14:59):
he also, we should point out, paid for that sign,
that Painless Parker sign in dentures. He didn't have the
money to pay the signmakers, so he gave the signmaker
a new set of dentures. And to be honest with you,
this cocaine solution hydro kane didn't always work. Sometimes sometimes
(15:21):
Parker would just say like, hey, do you like whiskey,
and then give them a glass of whiskey. Either way,
the narcotic did tend to work, and soon he was
making hand over fist money as a traveling dentist. And
he would he would particularly love to borrow a nearby
(15:42):
rocking chair for his patients so he could lean them
back and work on them. And then he started becoming
a He started becoming a character. You know. He knew
that he had to be memorable in the public eye.
He had to somehow succeed against the intense this people
had a dentist. So he went big. He got a
(16:03):
white coat and a top hat, and then he would
put planted. He would gather an audience right by a wagon,
just like you would imagine a medicine show, and then
he would put plants in the audience. I mean people
pretending they didn't know him, not like a good elephant
or or something or something. You know what it makes
me think of. It makes me think of the the regular,
(16:26):
the real life incarnation of the Wizard of Oz and
the Wizard of Oz movie. What was his name, like
Dr Mysterio or something like that medicine show. Yeah, it was, Yeah,
but they had like he had like a big wagon
with his logo painted on the side and would pedal
these you know, tonics or whatever like mystical cures. And
you know, they called him snake oil salesman because they
(16:46):
were rooted in hucksterism, and it was, you know, there
was no truth to any of the remedies. I mean,
he was offering a service that was real, and I
mean and he was offering a narcotic that would hopefully
help numb the pain, because let's just remember cocaine is
a numbing agent, or can be a numbing agent, and
(17:08):
that was how it was used. But apparently also like
this it comes a little later, but he uh, he
would sometimes not even fully inject the tooth. He would
just sort of squirt it on there on the cavity. Um.
I think probably because he was trying to conserve his supply.
I'm just guessing there, but yeah, it's true. He was
definitely like on the street corner with his top hat
(17:29):
kind of like making a big song and dance out
of this whole thing, and it was yeah, yeah, yeah,
let me go back to the plant thing because it's
very important. First, it's it's unethical. We can agree. But
he here's what he did with the patient or his
fake patient, his test any patient. They would pretend to
pull out a mohler and then show the audience, Hey,
(17:52):
I've been hiding this tooth. This this extraction from painless
Parker was a breeze and in a brass band would start.
There would be people dancing and cortortionists, and then this
guy would be you know, step right up, step right up,
and this podka, uh fifty cents extraction five dollars if
you feel that out to pain. And then while he
(18:15):
was pulling the tooth out, Uh, this this is so crazy,
he would he would signal the band to reach a crescendo,
and so as this person was screaming, if they were screaming, like,
oh god, you said it wouldn't hurt be you, son
of an. It's like brass bands are loud. Um uh
(18:39):
definitely cold John out of screen. I do wonder that
how did he get away without having to like pay
out five bucks every time that he had to stamp
his foot for the brass band, presumably because someone was like,
you know, screaming and agony. I wondered about that to Nuel,
because as we'll find, he did make some enemies, he
did get away unscathed here. Uh that answer, I don't know.
(19:03):
It's tough, it gets. I wonder that was an early
I wonder if that was an early part of his gimmick.
And then when he brought in the brass band and
the contortion is maybe he abandoned that part because he
had enough bells and whistles to bring people without the
money back here. Yeah, it must be because he's got
so much overhead now he is. And again this is
the time when he really started kind of like being
(19:23):
a little bit cheap. When it came to doling out
that sweet sweet, you know, tooth juice, he would occasionally
only scored it on the tooth, or he wouldn't inject
it at all, or like you said, or just like
give him a little bit of whiskey, or squired it
in the cavity. And even when he injected it, like
you said, sometimes didn't work. But still, against all odds,
(19:44):
that brass band man that did it, that was more
of a helpful distraction I think than the pain medication even.
I think the whole circus of it all gave people
something to focus on outside of the nasty b in
this of going to the dentist. And let's not forget
too people that are at the point this is actually
(20:05):
actually probably also a good um potential answer for the
five dollar back guarantee. People that are getting to this
point where they're going and seeking out a dentist are
already in horrible pain, right, I mean, this would have
been a time where they would have let it go
to the point where they're just like dying. We've had
too problems in the past, both of us, I believe in,
and when it's bad, you'll do anything, you know, you'll
(20:28):
do anything to get it to get it taken care of. Yeah,
that's a really good point. And you know, just for context,
at this time in history, the vast majority of people
aren't really going in for checkups. Right, Like you said,
no preventive preventative dentistry. But here's what here's what Parker
has done. Now he's he's made his profession a spectacle
(20:55):
and now people are responding to a social event that
they head together. Part of the fear and the pain
for people when they visit the dentist is it's you
and one other person in this room, right, But now
you're seeing people say, look he pulled my tooth out
and it's fine, and you don't know their line and
(21:15):
there's a band and it's awesome and people are all cheering. Oh,
and you get this really cool if I may max
fanfare whenever it's the tooth is successfully extracted, like like
like like okay, it's like it's like we won the
level of Zelda, you know, I mean, you're like, it's
it's it's this this whole queue, everyone's like the tensions
(21:35):
building and then dada and then Zelda. Soundtrack is based
on Parker's band. It's a huge family's historical fact. But
this wasn't this didn't last he had made this, you know, honestly,
he had to some in the dental profession as it
was starting to become more I mean, it wasn't. Let look,
(21:58):
he went to this, you aniversity that was very much
a serious dental university, Temple what what was then what
is now Temple Um in Philadelphia, So you know, dentistry
was beginning to become a serious profession, and those who
took it seriously really resented Parker. So you know, he
(22:19):
was the subject of lawsuits, he was the subject of
a lot of negative talk in the press even and
he eventually decided, you know what, maybe this is a
little too much for me. So he went to Canada,
the West coast of Canada, and tried to turn this
whole thing around and become one of those uh, you know,
legitimate dentists that hated him so much in Victoria, and
(22:42):
he set up shop there with a regular old dental practice,
and then he got in trouble because he did not
have a local license. So it didn't matter if you
graduated from this prestigious university. He needed local accreditation. And
so he has a brief adventure that I would love
to read as a comic book graphic novel spinoff. For
(23:05):
part of eight into eight. Parker lives in a place
called Sitka, Alaska. He is the state's loan dentist, the
dentist of the Frozen Frontier. I can see it now,
you know, I can feel some epic music there. His
parents and sister. Meanwhile, they moved to Brooklyn, and in
(23:25):
May of eight he goes and visits them, and he's
still he's still very budget conscious, right, So he's like,
I don't know if I can afford someone to play
the horn for me for my act, So maybe I
can learn to play the cornet myself. But it doesn't
(23:46):
work because he needs to focus on being a dentist.
I totally. And he also apparently has no inherent musical
talent whatsoever. Um and you know is catterwalling away on
this cornet and a neighbor woman who's practicing the piano
bangs on the door and says, who's making all that racket?
And a reply comes from within. This is from a
(24:07):
Santa Cruz Sentinel article as well. A reply comes from within,
Oh that's my brother, painless Parker. And wouldn't you know it,
Parker and the complaining pianists eventually get married. It was
that's what they call him, meat cute right there. That's
a meat cute. That is, he opens an office in Brooklyn,
but he's still struggling to just to make rent, much
(24:30):
less make a profit or save some money. The guy
has collect his rent is a guy named William Bibe
or b B who said, quote, look, Parker, you're being
a dope. There are lots of doctor Parker's. He was
called himself Dr. E. R. Parker at this time, but
there's only one painless Parker and his. This guy tells him,
(24:50):
you know, if you go back to do it in
your circus stuff, you'll be a millionaire. And a million
dollars was a lot more money back then as well,
no joke. And this guy Bebee Beebe, that's got I
don't know, let's let's standardize Bbie. What do you think ben?
I like calling him the Bebe. Let's call the bebes
so the bebes Um, he's got a name for it.
(25:12):
He turns out used to be a manager for the P. T.
Barnum Circus or Barnum, you know, you know, the biggest,
the greatest show on Earth and all that. And uh
he knew this exactly the kind of background that that
Parker came from. And he was like, what are you doing? Man?
You were a sensation. I know it was. I mean,
Barnum was always a little scandalous when he'd come to town,
(25:32):
and the Beebes saw that kind of spark in parker
Um and he said, you know, what are you doing? Man?
You gotta go back to being the greatest dental showman
you know around and he was trying Parker was trying
to you know, turn his ways around. I guess um,
I don't know that he had shame about it, but
it does seem like from his trajectory bend, especially that
(25:55):
weird sojourn to Alaska, like he was struggling with it
a little bit right with his his own sense of self,
Like what am I? You know, he had a identity
crisis or something. He's like, am I just one of
the rabble? You know? Do I just want to be
one of the you know, the the dental herd, or
do I want to like be something greater? And he
(26:16):
sort of lost sight of who he was for a while,
and now this guy is helping him find that again. Yeah,
and so he gets pretty, he gets it, gets weird.
He's back to he's back to being this showman. Like
you said, he's got his this guy's outfit on again.
Picture the you know, the circus ring master and the
(26:37):
tall hat, the long tails and uh, you know, the
somewhat grizzly edition of a necklace made out of teeth,
which was uh somehow not creepy to a lot of people. Uh.
And then they he and William, the Bebes made a
genuine circus. They had acrobats, they had jugglers. Parker even
(27:00):
rode atop an elephant a time or two. And this
this change the game for his office. All of a sudden,
waves of people are coming in. He's booked to the gills.
He has to turn people away. We've got no room
for more clients. He ends up renting. He goes big,
immediately renting six more offices. He hires other no offense
(27:22):
Parker slightly more legit dentists to run these offices, and
he pays them more than they would make working somewhere else.
But they still don't like him. It feels bad. They
feel like the money is is somehow dirty. Because of
the the spectacle Parker is associated with, people see him
more as an entertainer in some circles or than a dentist.
(27:46):
And other dentists, you know, other dentists. It's no secret
they seem to look down upon him pretty severely. Yeah,
and and speaking of the Bebe, I just want to
point out this wonderful article that we started at the
top of the show from the BBC a k a.
The b Painless Parker, part dentist, part showman, all American,
and you can see a wonderful image of that tooth
(28:09):
necklace and it is absolutely uh maccab And this article
is James Bartlett kind of talking through the legacy of
Painless Parker, and it's an excellent read. But he basically
just ups the anti on the smaller kind of medicine
show that he was doing before. I get he must
have gotten some investment. I mean, I think he had
(28:29):
had some success up to this point, so maybe he
had some money squirrelled away. But um, it seems like
he really did take it up to the next level,
like you said, adding acrobats and magicians even and uh
and live animals. I mean, this really was like a
traveling circus and it made a ton of money, an
absolute mint uh and and really paved the way for
(28:51):
what would ultimately become a dental empire for Painless Parker.
Oh yeah, empire is not a hyperball phrase to use there,
because he was the first person to do this successfully,
but he wasn't the only one. There were other people
who would follow in his path. They would try to,
(29:13):
you know, they would try to have a little bit
of theater and spectacle to get people into their doors.
But because he was the first, he was also the
most famous, and he didn't get a lot of This
did not make him the bell of the dental community ball,
but this did bring him a lot of money. And
(29:37):
as Michael Pollock points out righting for The New York Times,
he had the he he had all these kind of corny,
highly illiteratetive phrases, these slogans that people really love proclaimed
by popular pressing pulpit paying this part of his positively
perfect I've noticed how he had pulpit thrown in there.
(30:00):
I wonder if that was a reference back to his old,
his old Bible thumping days. It makes it sound like
there's a preacher who uh is everybody comes in on there,
you know, in church and some Sunday and this guy
stops for a second and says like, today's sermon is
brought to you by painless Parker exactly. Oh and dude,
I mean this building. It really is in the New
(30:21):
York Times article you mentioned Ben this building. It's it's
a huge building by the way um in in Brooklyn.
And there is an image on the article courtesy of
the Museum of the City of New York. That shows
the slogans that he just had all over the building,
like covering every flat kind of like paintable surface, and
at the top it says, I am positively it and
(30:44):
the it is like three stories tall in painless dentistry.
And apparently he would I mean his showmanship when it
came to like advertising for his practice. Really there was
no um no and nothing you wouldn't do. There is
no end to it. He you know, what what is it?
Fly men or spiderman flies, human flies. They're kind of
(31:06):
an old school thing. The dudes that would like kind
of scale tall buildings in New York City or or
you know, they're big city skyscrapers. And he would have
those dudes like hire them out and have them scale
his building, and particularly scale that it um which is
the highest point of the building. It literally goes to
the very very very tippy top. So he knew how
to draw a crowd, that's for sure. There would yeah,
(31:29):
it would be tight rope walkers that would have that
would be you know, doing the typrope back, but they'd
also be holding a sign like I'm going to payless
barkers and this this is brilliant marketing. So customers also
eventually fill up his new expanded office, that huge building.
(31:50):
And so he gets a horse drawn kind of flatbed
with a dentist chair for his traveling shows, and he
keeps this bucket of teeth close at hands so he
can show it to people, probably while he's still rocking
that necklace. And over time we have to point out
he deserves this to be pointed out. Over time, he
(32:11):
has become a competent dentist, you know what I mean.
He was rushing there in the beginning, and it's not
that's true, but he's become a competent dentist. And unfortunately
his marketing and his pr has made people in the
dentistry community and other communities always dismiss him as a
(32:32):
flam and flam guy, a con man. But he is
at this point a dentist who would be considered legit
in his time. And he's also not even practically not
even the one that's doing most of the work. He's
got like a team now working under him. He's ten. Yeah,
he's a brand name, exactly like a fifteen licensed dentists,
(32:53):
many of whom you know. According to various accounts that
we've read very much resented working for him because he
represents sentered this thing that we've been talking about the
whole time, this kind of bastardization of the noble profession
of tooth plumbing. Right, But there there they were because
he paid well and he was kind of the biggest
game in town. So he essentially started in the Santa
(33:14):
Cruz Sentinel article refers to it as assembly line dentistry.
So he really does have like a system. They even
had these like pulleys with like clothes lines where they'd
send the receipts to the cashier, you know, like zip
line it over to him. And by the early nineteen hundreds,
by undred particular, he had five branches throughout New York
(33:35):
City and also in upstate New York, in Albany and
in Troy, and all told, was making five grand a day.
This deserves an inflation calculators. Uh yeah, that's some tuban
throat singing lovers studied Max. Uh. Here's the result, folks,
(33:59):
five thou and dollars in nineteen hundred would be worth
one sixty thousand, two hundred thirty five dollars and twelve
cents today. That is a ton of money to be
making every single day. Uh. This this goes on for
a while and it's you know, it's successful, and the
Beabs by the way is still is still very much
(34:22):
in the mix until nineteen o four he passes away,
and then a few weeks later Parker himself contracts typhoid.
And at this point we have to ask ourselves, and
this is purely speculation, but we have to ask ourselves
whether Parker felt he had sacrificed financial success for professional reputation,
(34:47):
because you can get a sense of how severely people
dislike him like as as Pollock points out, there's a
nineteen article from Hampton's magazine that describes his the Painless
Parker Building. Lastly, at the junction of Flatbush Avenue and
Pacific Street is a gigantic brownstone building the fronts Brooklyn's
(35:09):
busiest square. This building, emblazoned with blue signs, is a
monument to the colossal and blatant self puffery of the
most notorious of all the swindling tooth tinkers. It is
the original headquarters of the most conceited Charlatan that dental
quackery has ever known, The Citadel of painless Parker, the
drum cord dentist, The drum cords dentist. Wow, harsh, bro harsh.
(35:35):
And this is so this is published five years after
he's sold his stake in the business, high tailed it
to l A with his family to retire and get
this the ripe old age of thirty five. You lucky,
so ago l I mean, I guess you know, in
the same way that inflation calculators work. That sort of
works for age two five in nineteen ten would have
(35:57):
been more like probably fifty in terms of life expected
seat today maybe not, I don't know, but it is funny.
He definitely made a mint and was able to to,
you know, take off to l A. But the showman's
you know, you can take the man out of the show,
but you can't take the show out of the man,
can you, Ben, You can't do it. He got the
(36:24):
itch and realized that there was a market to be
cornered in on the West coast for circus dentistry. Yeah, yeah,
this actually this kind of sounds fun. Uh. So you
go to Santa Cruz and you you would see a
parade in the morning, then a show, a series of
shows in intent that was kind of a hybrid of
(36:48):
circus acts, but then also featured Parker coming out and
telling you how to have good dental hygiene and then saying,
by the way, anybody got a sort tooth? Because I'm
right here, we got the I got the bucket. You
can see the necklace. This is what I do. Uh,
it works again. He's onto something. He's got another empire started,
(37:11):
or a franchise. At least he's got what five five
different offices and five different towns. And Ben, you make
a really good point. You know, he is giving lectures
on dental hygiene, which is pretty forward thinking, despite you know,
his reputation as being a charlatan. I mean, he did
seemingly have a bit of a head start on this
thing that we think of now is so important and
(37:33):
honestly the most important part of dentistry. And Uh. In
the BBC article that I mentioned, where you can see
that fantastic image of the tooth necklace, there's an advertisement
that says this fixed teeth stay fixed longer when kept
clean with painless Parker tooth powder or paste, the product
of fifty years experience. Wait a minute, but he is
(37:55):
thirty five. I don't understand the product. Okay, so maybe
there's just some Charlottean Are you going on the brought
ut the fifty years experience? None better? Ask your druggist
and Ben. You were just in Philly. You know you
went to some museums, but I don't imagine you went
to the Cornberg School of Dentistry museum, which sounds pretty cool.
I love weird old medical tech, and I love I
(38:15):
love old medical tech. I also love museums about very
specific things. That's I don't know why, just like I
love reference works about very specific things. This Philly has
got some weird ones. They've got the Motor Museum, which
I think is a lot of weird at taxidermy and
like medical appliances. And there's a few other kind of
very specific ones in Philly too. For some time I got,
(38:38):
you know, I got lost in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It's just wonderful. It's Laborntine too, so you can find
so many amazing things. But yes, I will put this
on my list for what I returned to Philly. Also,
Parker is taking better care of himself at this point
in his life. He stops drinking, he stopped smoking, and
(38:59):
he's focusing on this showmanship. Eventually he says, you know,
I need to pay I need to be more mindful
of bacteria, right, and contamination. So I'm not gonna do
these sidewalk demonstrations anymore. And he starts screening educational films
(39:21):
about dental hygiene in his office, and people are always
invited to come in for a free check up. But
like like we said before, man, he's made some enemies
because we we mentioned, especially in you know, those earlier times,
his dental extractions often were not painless, right, and there
(39:42):
were people who felt they had been swindled, they felt
they had been sold a bill of goods, and other
dentists were aware that there were angry patients. The American
Dental Association even called him a menace to the dignity
of the profession. Yeah, because Parker really had this kind
(40:04):
of checkered legacy. Or on the one hand, he was
seen as the charlatan and this kind of snake oil salesman.
But on the other hand, he definitely developed some techniques
and some kind of forward thinking ways of looking at
the dental hygiene right that that you know, kind of
persists to this day. And also not to mention the
idea of a precursor to novacaine that he kind of
(40:24):
just invented, uh more or less. But the former dean
of the Temple University, Maurice H. Kornberg School of Dentistry,
Dr Ahmid Ishmael makes a really really good point that
I think is one that is good to leave with today.
Um that he quote serves as a warning to consumers
(40:44):
even today. Scientific evidence must remain the foundation of clinical
care in any health field, otherwise we will be victims
to modern Charlottean's. So I think it's no accident that
that museum we're talking about still has on display a
bucket of teeth and that weird maccabre tooth necklace and
(41:05):
keeps the memory of Painless Parker alive. And there are
other aspects of this story, little facts here and there
that give you even more of a sense of of
Parker's life. He legally changed his first name to Painless,
for example. His and his contributions are you know, undeniable,
(41:25):
even though he could arguably be called a con artist
at different times. Uh. I love the point that the
dean makes there because it's it's an important one. And
if you'd like to if you'd like to learn more
about why this point is so important, I would recommend
checking out our episode on Stuff they Don't Want You
(41:45):
to Know, called Stuff they Don't Want You to Know
goes to the Dentist. We found there's a lot of
opportunity for bad actors when they have somebody in a
vulnerable position like this with with the power and balance,
because you know, the dentist knows what they are doing,
but the patient doesn't really know what no what's going
(42:06):
on in there totally. And the reason he changed his name,
by the way, to Painless Parker was because of a
new law that came about in California preventing dentist from
practicing under anything but their real name, because they believed
that Painless Parker was false advertising, not only because it
was a pseudonym, because it promised painless um, you know,
(42:30):
dental procedures. H So that's why he changed his name.
But he was so very much part of the zeitgeist
at the time that just a couple of years before
he died in nineteen eight, Bob Hope played a character
in a movie called Pale Face with Jane Mansfield named
Peter painless Potter who is a kind of a Huxtery
(42:53):
snake oil dentist um and Parker, you know, lived to
see the picture and loved it apparently, and also it
gave him a little more publicity, which you can't You
can't buy publicity like that. No such thing as bad publicity.
I bet Parker believed, he probably did. He probably did,
but that's not a statement everybody agrees with. We also
(43:14):
want to give a shout out to Michael D. Tola,
who was himself a dentist, who helpefully points out that
Parker was at one point in his career quote more
famous than the president. M h, it's pretty crazy. Yeah,
it's you know, at least he didn't say it. He
probably said it and then had somebody else he put
(43:36):
a plant in the crowd. But did we mention that
the dentists have a particularly unusually high rate of suicide,
particularly in the medical community. There's a there's a couple
of stats from success dot ader dot org. Apparently male
dentists have the highest rate of suicide within the medical
community at eight point two percent, and then female dentists
(43:57):
of the fourth highest at five point to a doctor's
seven point eight seven, pharmacists seven point one nine, nurses
six point five six, But yeah, eight point two percent
for for dentists. It's apparently a thing. And not to
end on a down note, which we won't, but um,
there's a really and if you want to explore this
trend in any more depth, there's a great article on
Vice our dentists really more prone to suicide by Elizabeth
(44:20):
Brown and they quote a dentist saying when you're in
a career where nobody wants to see you, and you're
the last place they want to come back to, and
it's depressing. Um, which is something that painless Parker I
think was trying to, you know, turn on its head
a bit right. Yeah, and this is a this is
a statistic. Uh, you'll see bandied around in various forms
of The doctor you quote makes a good point about this.
(44:43):
I didn't include it in stuff they don't want you
to know as episode on dentistry because we didn't you
want to focus on the tragedy of suicide. There is
some sand to that research. However, let's send on some
maybe some weird, slightly fun slash gross dental facts. Did
you know that there are people getting tattoos on their
(45:05):
caps and crowns, tooth tattoos. They can't do it yet. Okay, Yeah,
that's okay, I guess that. That's so. I guess that
sort of like, ah, maybe the equivalent of getting like
a gold grill or like a diamond encrusted tooth or
something like that of the vanity area of dentistry. Yeah,
I guess so. I guess so. I've also seen this thing,
(45:26):
or I've seen reports of this thing where people are
getting their teeth like colored or decorated the way that
you would fingernails, through some kind of some kind of process.
It's not permanent, at least as far as I know.
But here's a cool ice breaker you can throw out
there next time you find yourself in the dentist's office. Uh.
(45:47):
The average person, over the course of their life apparently
spends thirty eight days total brushing their teeth. Well, hopefully
all of us who have maybe let some of that
dental upkeep fall by the wayside during COVID can look
at that as a as an inspiration to change our ways. Ben,
I want to end with one more fact, if you
(46:08):
don't mind, Uh. The comical dental fact is that cotton
candy was invented by a dentist. There the literal like
bane of of dentistry was invented by a dentist. This
dude named Dr William James Morrison, who uh mental flaws
described as being a man at odds with himself because
not only was he in the dental profession, he also
(46:30):
had a sweet tooth and was sort of a fair
uh you know, part time confectioner. Um. And while you know,
what you would call candy floss has been used for
generations in various cultures. Um, what we would think of
as the type of machine spun sugar cotton candy was
in fact debut at the nineteen four World's Fair by
(46:52):
a dentist. Thanks so much for tuning in, folks, Hope
you enjoyed this one thanks to our super producers Casey
Pegram and the one and only Max Williams. Max, what's
your We forgot to ask you at the top, what's
your what's your take on dentist deal? Are you a
are you an ardent fan of dentistry? So I have
a story in the past where I went a little
(47:15):
too long without going the dentist Like I'm not gonna
say how many years it was on Eric's Is that bad?
But uh, no dentist, they're uh, they're fine people. I
don't like them, but they do an important job. Well,
you you mean you don't like having to go to
the dentist. You're not saying like when you find out
a friend is a dentist, you're like, oh, forget it.
This is oh no, no, no, I am saying that best.
(47:40):
Thanks so much to Jonathan Strickland's a k a. The Wister,
Thanks as always to Gabe Bluesier, research associate. Uh and
thanks to all the dentists out there. You're doing good,
profound uh and often thankless work. And you know, in addition,
the people who get ignored often thanks to the dentistry
assistance thanks to the hygenis. Thanks to everybody who makes
(48:03):
good teeth possible, including including you, folks. Let's all remember
to brush. We'll see you next time, folks. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super
producer Casey Pegrum. Shout out to our super producer, the
one and only Max Williams. I'm ben. I guess I
should I should come clean. I put off some dental
work during the pandemic. And when I when I came
(00:48):
back to the dentist chair, who was the trip man? Well,
I put on some weight during the pandemic. Is that
the same thing? No, I know it's not, but it's
common right. People let things go during these quarantine times,
and dental work certainly is one of them. I think
we don't remember which show was on, but we've talked
recently about I'm no by the way, uh dentals, I
(01:10):
know what it was. It was. We did a stuff
that I want you to know episode recently about the
kind of weird world of dentistry fraud, which is kind
of a thing, and this sort of rolls into that
there's some dentistry fraud going on in today's story, but
also some weird historical, kind of positive things that came
from this fraud. What are we talking about. We're talking
about the life of a dude named Painless Parker. That
(01:35):
was not his Christian name. We'll get to that. His
name is Edgar Parker. That's what he was born in
eighteen seventy two. As but yeah, this guy was basically
what you might call a circus dentist. What does that mean, Well,
we'll tell you, yes, circus dentist. And and it's a phrase.
We can back up this This entire this entire circus
(02:00):
uh comes about because when Parker opens his practice back
in two it's not an immediate hit. His business is
struggling a little bit, and so he figures he has
to do something else and he starts thinking outside of
the box. That's what leads us to real life dental circus.
(02:23):
As we dive into the story, I want to point
out we're getting a lot of this information from several sources.
Smithsonian Magazine in particular, with the great title remember when
teeth pulling was fun? As well as Mental floss and
the Santa Cruz Sentinel. That's right, there's also a New
York Times article. Was Painless Parker a vaudeville joke or
(02:44):
a real Brooklyn Dentist by Michael Pollock and a series
of books written by Peter M. Pointage and Art N. G. Kristen,
who are dental historians. Um, just wanted to knock that
out here at the top, but yeah, it's true, Ben Um.
So this guy, Edgar Parker, he studied dentistry at what
today is Temple University. He was born in New Brunswick, Canada,
(03:08):
in the town of Tynemouth Creek, which is on the
shores there of New Brunswick, Canada. Edgar Rudolph Randolph Parker.
He's got a Rudolph and a Randolph there just to
just to be safe. But his family was very religious
and he was he entered into initially for school Baptist
seminary at St. Martin's and he was he was actually
(03:31):
expelled for what was referred to as un christian like behavior. Um.
He had also spent some time as a sailor and
apparently cursed like one while in seminary. That that is,
that is my conjecture there. But I can only imagine
what the sailor like behavior that led to him being
expelled from seminary might have been. Anything really could have
(03:52):
been the jokes, right right, Maybe, I mean, yeah, there
there are a lot of things that would have sounded
absolutely normal to us in that may have been you know,
absolutely scandalous for him to say during this time. So
he he is terrified of going back home to his
(04:14):
folks and saying I got kicked out of seminary. Instead,
he becomes. Instead, he discovers his hustle, and it's a
hustle that'll have for the rest of his life. He
becomes a door to door salesman, and his boss directs
him to never like never leave people alone until they
buy something from him, and his father eventually catches up
(04:39):
with him eight nine. He is not over the moon
that his son has become a door to door salesman
rather than a preacher, so he drags him home. Kids
seventeen years old, runs away again, goes to see catches
dan gay fever. He's dropped off in Barbadosrhe right, that's
(05:00):
it's like the dangay fever. Uh that you may be
thinking of dysenterry Maybe what's but I thought dangay fever
had something to do with like he can give you
bleeding flu like symptoms and rashes. Okay, okay, so no, no,
not necessarily the direa. Sorry, thank you for setting me
(05:20):
straight back. He's he's now stricken with this unfortunate illness
while in the midst of trying to get his life
back together, I imagine, right, yeah, and the doctors who
are taking care of him impress him. You know. He
feels like they saved his life. He feels like this
maybe the most important vocation in the world. And so
(05:42):
when he gets back from another misadventure, he asked his parents, Hey,
can I can I be a doctor? I think that's
you know, I think that's my path forward in life.
But what does what does his folks do? Well, they
were not a family of particular means. They thought it
was a little price to go to medical school, but
(06:02):
they figured they could, you know, spring for the next
best thing, which was sort of an emerging feel at
the time, the field of dentistry um, which he later
according to a fabulous article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel
in Santa Cruz, they also spent some time. There's going
to come up in our story soon. He referred to
it as the noble tooth plumbing profession, plumb the depths
(06:25):
of of the Noble tooth Um, so he enrolled at
an initially New York College of Dentistry. He again didn't
have very much money. He had just enough to pay
for tuition, but didn't really have enough to eat, so
he kind of had to figure out a side hustle
to to make ends meet. And so he I don't
know if we've mentioned this, but the school of traveling
(06:47):
salesmanship that he ascribed to was sort of that like
stick your foot in the door and don't take no
for an answer situation. So he essentially adapted that mentality
to a door to door dental practice. US Before he
had even gotten his credentials, which was very common at
the time, many of the dentists that were practicing were
(07:07):
unlicensed because there really wasn't a whole lot of official
oversight yet because it was a relatively new field and
preventative dental care was really practically a non existent thing.
So he ends up going to Philadelphia Dental College next.
(07:27):
This is prestigious. This is the second oldest school of
its sort in the country. And you know, as you said, Noel,
that's now known as the Temple University Maurice H. Kornberg
School of dentistry. Santa Cruz Sentinel asked the dean of
the college, Dr amid Ismail, how Parker was during his
(07:52):
time there, and he said Parker was a terrible student
and that he only graduated because he literally begged the
dean at that time to pass him, which I didn't
know you could do. Yeah, it seems like this is
a very tender hearted dean, you know to be says
I've I've I've never gotten out of any uh college
(08:14):
failures by begging I or or maybe this guy's gift
of oration was just so profound that it worked. He's
been door to door, he was almost ah, well, he
was almost a preacher, So maybe just leveraged those skills. Anyway,
fast forward, he's twenty years old. He graduates, as he said,
(08:37):
eight nine ninety two, the same year he opens his practice.
He returns home and he thinks, Okay, I'm gonna do
things differently. I'm an innovator. He's saying to himself, what
is he? What does he innovator? First? Well, first of all,
(08:58):
I want to point out one thing that I think
is really fascinating about his time as a as a
door to door dentist, and by the way. He also
opened up his very first office before he even finished
dental school properly, like on seventeenth and Broadway in New York.
But when he found a procedure that he didn't have
the skills to perform, he promised to come back later.
(09:21):
And the indication there was that, you know, once he
got to that chapter in the in the textbook that
he was studying, because again, very very early, not a
whole lot of technology really involved in dentistry and certainly
not very effective pain management, you know, medications and in
the like. Um so, yeah, we've got him finally getting
(09:44):
out of school at the age of twenty in eighteen
ninety two. He comes home, he hooks up with a druggist,
a guy by the name of George Mallory. And I
think you're talking about innovations, Ben, and I was talking
about the lack of pain medication. We don't have no
vacane yet for quite some time, but we you may
(10:06):
know that cocaine was a hell of a drug then
as well as it is today, and was used in
the dental profession. It was actually used for quite some time.
Uh they called a pharmaceutical grade cocaine and it was
something that um you would find in dental offices, maybe
even as recently as the nineteen eighties. But he and
George Mallory, the druggist, tinkered around with a formula and
(10:29):
ended up with a deluded solution of cocaine that they
called hydrocane, and it is considered the kind of precursor
to novocaine. And it was a very very modern innovation
for the time. And so it came to pass that
Parker was prepared to be on like the bleeding edge
(10:53):
of dentistry. But as I said, at the very top,
nobody showed up to his job. It was like the
nicest restaurant that no one ate at. And so he
was worried that maybe some maybe there are hints that
maybe his reputation for being kicked out a seminary had
(11:17):
something to do with this, or maybe that was just
all in his mind. He said, Okay, I've got either way.
He decided he's got to be embedded in the culture.
He's got to be embedded in the society around him,
rather right, because usually people like to work with folks
they already know. So he starts going to church, not
just on Sundays, but twice on Sundays. He's trying to
(11:40):
really show out. You know, he wants to be the
honor student of the church. I guess he's sitting right
in the front. He's seeing a passing the collection plate.
He's got a huge bible that he carries around everywhere.
But no one, no one goes to his practice. There
are other dentists around, or they are just a fraid
(12:00):
of dentists. His profits after three months are something abominably low,
like seventy five cents. And he goes to his pal
Mallory and he's like, Hey, what the heck man and
Matt we're paraphrasing. Mallory says, Oh, you know, people are
afraid of dentists. If they find when they trust, they
stick with him and the town's long established dentists, the
(12:23):
cornered the market. And that's part of what we're talking about,
the stuff they don't want you to know episode because
it can be an inherently uncomfortable proposition to trust people
have for dentists they know can be pretty powerful. Yeah,
that's true. I mean, even though like most of the
work is done by hygienis that kind of rotate in
and out. I mean, I guess some have like a
smaller staff, but that matters, that final little inspection, you know,
(12:46):
from the dentist there, like, you know, the main procedure
they kind of give their sign off on, even if
they're not the actual ones digging around in your mouth
the whole time. Um, that relationship matters. And I think
that's something that Parker really understood that they He needed
to find a way to kind of take the fear
out of dentistry, and he he did a thing that
(13:07):
was probably the most bizarre and extreme version of that
proposition that I could imagine. And by the way, I
want to give huge thanks and credit to the Santa
Cruz Sentinel author ross Eric Gibson Um for a very
very cool article in the paper called Painless Parker and
the Showmanship of dentistry. And that showmanship evolved, but it
(13:28):
began with something quite simple. The idea of soliciting patients
at the time was considered unethical. It's real catch twenty two.
It's really interesting, right, I've got no patience, No one
knows about me. My competition is is is cornered the market,
(13:51):
and yet it's unethical for me to solicit or to
advertise for my practice. But he decided, you know what,
screw it. I'm in the rock and a hard place,
like you said, and I am going to put myself
out there, and he dubbed himself. He gave himself a
moniker that he thought would really sell his practice, and
that was the name Painless Parker. Because at the time
(14:13):
these offices or these practices were called dental parlors. They
were again mostly staffed by unlicensed dentists, and they were
pretty unsanitary. There wasn't any standard of sanitation or sterilization yet,
and this stuff was painful. They didn't have his water
(14:35):
down cocaine solution. I don't imagine um. So he figured
that Painless Moniker was really going to get people in
the door. And he claimed that he could extract a
tooth for fifty cents and it would be painless, and
then if it wasn't, he would pay the patient five dollars,
five dollars that he admittedly did not have. So yeah,
(14:59):
he also, we should point out, paid for that sign,
that Painless Parker sign in dentures. He didn't have the
money to pay the signmakers, so he gave the signmaker
a new set of dentures. And to be honest with you,
this cocaine solution hydro kane didn't always work. Sometimes sometimes
(15:21):
Parker would just say like, hey, do you like whiskey,
and then give them a glass of whiskey. Either way,
the narcotic did tend to work, and soon he was
making hand over fist money as a traveling dentist. And
he would he would particularly love to borrow a nearby
(15:42):
rocking chair for his patients so he could lean them
back and work on them. And then he started becoming
a He started becoming a character. You know. He knew
that he had to be memorable in the public eye.
He had to somehow succeed against the intense this people
had a dentist. So he went big. He got a
(16:03):
white coat and a top hat, and then he would
put planted. He would gather an audience right by a wagon,
just like you would imagine a medicine show, and then
he would put plants in the audience. I mean people
pretending they didn't know him, not like a good elephant
or or something or something. You know what it makes
me think of. It makes me think of the the regular,
(16:26):
the real life incarnation of the Wizard of Oz and
the Wizard of Oz movie. What was his name, like
Dr Mysterio or something like that medicine show. Yeah, it was, Yeah,
but they had like he had like a big wagon
with his logo painted on the side and would pedal
these you know, tonics or whatever like mystical cures. And
you know, they called him snake oil salesman because they
(16:46):
were rooted in hucksterism, and it was, you know, there
was no truth to any of the remedies. I mean,
he was offering a service that was real, and I
mean and he was offering a narcotic that would hopefully
help numb the pain, because let's just remember cocaine is
a numbing agent, or can be a numbing agent, and
(17:08):
that was how it was used. But apparently also like
this it comes a little later, but he uh, he
would sometimes not even fully inject the tooth. He would
just sort of squirt it on there on the cavity. Um.
I think probably because he was trying to conserve his supply.
I'm just guessing there, but yeah, it's true. He was
definitely like on the street corner with his top hat
(17:29):
kind of like making a big song and dance out
of this whole thing, and it was yeah, yeah, yeah,
let me go back to the plant thing because it's
very important. First, it's it's unethical. We can agree. But
he here's what he did with the patient or his
fake patient, his test any patient. They would pretend to
pull out a mohler and then show the audience, Hey,
(17:52):
I've been hiding this tooth. This this extraction from painless
Parker was a breeze and in a brass band would start.
There would be people dancing and cortortionists, and then this
guy would be you know, step right up, step right up,
and this podka, uh fifty cents extraction five dollars if
you feel that out to pain. And then while he
(18:15):
was pulling the tooth out, Uh, this this is so crazy,
he would he would signal the band to reach a crescendo,
and so as this person was screaming, if they were screaming, like,
oh god, you said it wouldn't hurt be you, son
of an. It's like brass bands are loud. Um uh
(18:39):
definitely cold John out of screen. I do wonder that
how did he get away without having to like pay
out five bucks every time that he had to stamp
his foot for the brass band, presumably because someone was like,
you know, screaming and agony. I wondered about that to Nuel,
because as we'll find, he did make some enemies, he
did get away unscathed here. Uh that answer, I don't know.
(19:03):
It's tough, it gets. I wonder that was an early
I wonder if that was an early part of his gimmick.
And then when he brought in the brass band and
the contortion is maybe he abandoned that part because he
had enough bells and whistles to bring people without the
money back here. Yeah, it must be because he's got
so much overhead now he is. And again this is
the time when he really started kind of like being
(19:23):
a little bit cheap. When it came to doling out
that sweet sweet, you know, tooth juice, he would occasionally
only scored it on the tooth, or he wouldn't inject
it at all, or like you said, or just like
give him a little bit of whiskey, or squired it
in the cavity. And even when he injected it, like
you said, sometimes didn't work. But still, against all odds,
(19:44):
that brass band man that did it, that was more
of a helpful distraction I think than the pain medication even.
I think the whole circus of it all gave people
something to focus on outside of the nasty b in
this of going to the dentist. And let's not forget
too people that are at the point this is actually
(20:05):
actually probably also a good um potential answer for the
five dollar back guarantee. People that are getting to this
point where they're going and seeking out a dentist are
already in horrible pain, right, I mean, this would have
been a time where they would have let it go
to the point where they're just like dying. We've had
too problems in the past, both of us, I believe in,
and when it's bad, you'll do anything, you know, you'll
(20:28):
do anything to get it to get it taken care of. Yeah,
that's a really good point. And you know, just for context,
at this time in history, the vast majority of people
aren't really going in for checkups. Right, Like you said,
no preventive preventative dentistry. But here's what here's what Parker
has done. Now he's he's made his profession a spectacle
(20:55):
and now people are responding to a social event that
they head together. Part of the fear and the pain
for people when they visit the dentist is it's you
and one other person in this room, right, But now
you're seeing people say, look he pulled my tooth out
and it's fine, and you don't know their line and
(21:15):
there's a band and it's awesome and people are all cheering. Oh,
and you get this really cool if I may max
fanfare whenever it's the tooth is successfully extracted, like like
like like okay, it's like it's like we won the
level of Zelda, you know, I mean, you're like, it's
it's it's this this whole queue, everyone's like the tensions
(21:35):
building and then dada and then Zelda. Soundtrack is based
on Parker's band. It's a huge family's historical fact. But
this wasn't this didn't last he had made this, you know, honestly,
he had to some in the dental profession as it
was starting to become more I mean, it wasn't. Let look,
(21:58):
he went to this, you aniversity that was very much
a serious dental university, Temple what what was then what
is now Temple Um in Philadelphia, So you know, dentistry
was beginning to become a serious profession, and those who
took it seriously really resented Parker. So you know, he
(22:19):
was the subject of lawsuits, he was the subject of
a lot of negative talk in the press even and
he eventually decided, you know what, maybe this is a
little too much for me. So he went to Canada,
the West coast of Canada, and tried to turn this
whole thing around and become one of those uh, you know,
legitimate dentists that hated him so much in Victoria, and
(22:42):
he set up shop there with a regular old dental practice,
and then he got in trouble because he did not
have a local license. So it didn't matter if you
graduated from this prestigious university. He needed local accreditation. And
so he has a brief adventure that I would love
to read as a comic book graphic novel spinoff. For
(23:05):
part of eight into eight. Parker lives in a place
called Sitka, Alaska. He is the state's loan dentist, the
dentist of the Frozen Frontier. I can see it now,
you know, I can feel some epic music there. His
parents and sister. Meanwhile, they moved to Brooklyn, and in
(23:25):
May of eight he goes and visits them, and he's
still he's still very budget conscious, right, So he's like,
I don't know if I can afford someone to play
the horn for me for my act, So maybe I
can learn to play the cornet myself. But it doesn't
(23:46):
work because he needs to focus on being a dentist.
I totally. And he also apparently has no inherent musical
talent whatsoever. Um and you know is catterwalling away on
this cornet and a neighbor woman who's practicing the piano
bangs on the door and says, who's making all that racket?
And a reply comes from within. This is from a
(24:07):
Santa Cruz Sentinel article as well. A reply comes from within,
Oh that's my brother, painless Parker. And wouldn't you know it,
Parker and the complaining pianists eventually get married. It was
that's what they call him, meat cute right there. That's
a meat cute. That is, he opens an office in Brooklyn,
but he's still struggling to just to make rent, much
(24:30):
less make a profit or save some money. The guy
has collect his rent is a guy named William Bibe
or b B who said, quote, look, Parker, you're being
a dope. There are lots of doctor Parker's. He was
called himself Dr. E. R. Parker at this time, but
there's only one painless Parker and his. This guy tells him,
(24:50):
you know, if you go back to do it in
your circus stuff, you'll be a millionaire. And a million
dollars was a lot more money back then as well,
no joke. And this guy Bebee Beebe, that's got I
don't know, let's let's standardize Bbie. What do you think ben?
I like calling him the Bebe. Let's call the bebes
so the bebes Um, he's got a name for it.
(25:12):
He turns out used to be a manager for the P. T.
Barnum Circus or Barnum, you know, you know, the biggest,
the greatest show on Earth and all that. And uh
he knew this exactly the kind of background that that
Parker came from. And he was like, what are you doing? Man?
You were a sensation. I know it was. I mean,
Barnum was always a little scandalous when he'd come to town,
(25:32):
and the Beebes saw that kind of spark in parker
Um and he said, you know, what are you doing? Man?
You gotta go back to being the greatest dental showman
you know around and he was trying Parker was trying
to you know, turn his ways around. I guess um,
I don't know that he had shame about it, but
it does seem like from his trajectory bend, especially that
(25:55):
weird sojourn to Alaska, like he was struggling with it
a little bit right with his his own sense of self,
Like what am I? You know, he had a identity
crisis or something. He's like, am I just one of
the rabble? You know? Do I just want to be
one of the you know, the the dental herd, or
do I want to like be something greater? And he
(26:16):
sort of lost sight of who he was for a while,
and now this guy is helping him find that again. Yeah,
and so he gets pretty, he gets it, gets weird.
He's back to he's back to being this showman. Like
you said, he's got his this guy's outfit on again.
Picture the you know, the circus ring master and the
(26:37):
tall hat, the long tails and uh, you know, the
somewhat grizzly edition of a necklace made out of teeth,
which was uh somehow not creepy to a lot of people. Uh.
And then they he and William, the Bebes made a
genuine circus. They had acrobats, they had jugglers. Parker even
(27:00):
rode atop an elephant a time or two. And this
this change the game for his office. All of a sudden,
waves of people are coming in. He's booked to the gills.
He has to turn people away. We've got no room
for more clients. He ends up renting. He goes big,
immediately renting six more offices. He hires other no offense
(27:22):
Parker slightly more legit dentists to run these offices, and
he pays them more than they would make working somewhere else.
But they still don't like him. It feels bad. They
feel like the money is is somehow dirty. Because of
the the spectacle Parker is associated with, people see him
more as an entertainer in some circles or than a dentist.
(27:46):
And other dentists, you know, other dentists. It's no secret
they seem to look down upon him pretty severely. Yeah,
and and speaking of the Bebe, I just want to
point out this wonderful article that we started at the
top of the show from the BBC a k a.
The b Painless Parker, part dentist, part showman, all American,
and you can see a wonderful image of that tooth
(28:09):
necklace and it is absolutely uh maccab And this article
is James Bartlett kind of talking through the legacy of
Painless Parker, and it's an excellent read. But he basically
just ups the anti on the smaller kind of medicine
show that he was doing before. I get he must
have gotten some investment. I mean, I think he had
(28:29):
had some success up to this point, so maybe he
had some money squirrelled away. But um, it seems like
he really did take it up to the next level,
like you said, adding acrobats and magicians even and uh
and live animals. I mean, this really was like a
traveling circus and it made a ton of money, an
absolute mint uh and and really paved the way for
(28:51):
what would ultimately become a dental empire for Painless Parker.
Oh yeah, empire is not a hyperball phrase to use there,
because he was the first person to do this successfully,
but he wasn't the only one. There were other people
who would follow in his path. They would try to,
(29:13):
you know, they would try to have a little bit
of theater and spectacle to get people into their doors.
But because he was the first, he was also the
most famous, and he didn't get a lot of This
did not make him the bell of the dental community ball,
but this did bring him a lot of money. And
(29:37):
as Michael Pollock points out righting for The New York Times,
he had the he he had all these kind of corny,
highly illiteratetive phrases, these slogans that people really love proclaimed
by popular pressing pulpit paying this part of his positively
perfect I've noticed how he had pulpit thrown in there.
(30:00):
I wonder if that was a reference back to his old,
his old Bible thumping days. It makes it sound like
there's a preacher who uh is everybody comes in on there,
you know, in church and some Sunday and this guy
stops for a second and says like, today's sermon is
brought to you by painless Parker exactly. Oh and dude,
I mean this building. It really is in the New
(30:21):
York Times article you mentioned Ben this building. It's it's
a huge building by the way um in in Brooklyn.
And there is an image on the article courtesy of
the Museum of the City of New York. That shows
the slogans that he just had all over the building,
like covering every flat kind of like paintable surface, and
at the top it says, I am positively it and
(30:44):
the it is like three stories tall in painless dentistry.
And apparently he would I mean his showmanship when it
came to like advertising for his practice. Really there was
no um no and nothing you wouldn't do. There is
no end to it. He you know, what what is it?
Fly men or spiderman flies, human flies. They're kind of
(31:06):
an old school thing. The dudes that would like kind
of scale tall buildings in New York City or or
you know, they're big city skyscrapers. And he would have
those dudes like hire them out and have them scale
his building, and particularly scale that it um which is
the highest point of the building. It literally goes to
the very very very tippy top. So he knew how
to draw a crowd, that's for sure. There would yeah,
(31:29):
it would be tight rope walkers that would have that
would be you know, doing the typrope back, but they'd
also be holding a sign like I'm going to payless
barkers and this this is brilliant marketing. So customers also
eventually fill up his new expanded office, that huge building.
(31:50):
And so he gets a horse drawn kind of flatbed
with a dentist chair for his traveling shows, and he
keeps this bucket of teeth close at hands so he
can show it to people, probably while he's still rocking
that necklace. And over time we have to point out
he deserves this to be pointed out. Over time, he
(32:11):
has become a competent dentist, you know what I mean.
He was rushing there in the beginning, and it's not
that's true, but he's become a competent dentist. And unfortunately
his marketing and his pr has made people in the
dentistry community and other communities always dismiss him as a
(32:32):
flam and flam guy, a con man. But he is
at this point a dentist who would be considered legit
in his time. And he's also not even practically not
even the one that's doing most of the work. He's
got like a team now working under him. He's ten. Yeah,
he's a brand name, exactly like a fifteen licensed dentists,
(32:53):
many of whom you know. According to various accounts that
we've read very much resented working for him because he
represents sentered this thing that we've been talking about the
whole time, this kind of bastardization of the noble profession
of tooth plumbing. Right, But there there they were because
he paid well and he was kind of the biggest
game in town. So he essentially started in the Santa
(33:14):
Cruz Sentinel article refers to it as assembly line dentistry.
So he really does have like a system. They even
had these like pulleys with like clothes lines where they'd
send the receipts to the cashier, you know, like zip
line it over to him. And by the early nineteen hundreds,
by undred particular, he had five branches throughout New York
(33:35):
City and also in upstate New York, in Albany and
in Troy, and all told, was making five grand a day.
This deserves an inflation calculators. Uh yeah, that's some tuban
throat singing lovers studied Max. Uh. Here's the result, folks,
(33:59):
five thou and dollars in nineteen hundred would be worth
one sixty thousand, two hundred thirty five dollars and twelve
cents today. That is a ton of money to be
making every single day. Uh. This this goes on for
a while and it's you know, it's successful, and the
Beabs by the way is still is still very much
(34:22):
in the mix until nineteen o four he passes away,
and then a few weeks later Parker himself contracts typhoid.
And at this point we have to ask ourselves, and
this is purely speculation, but we have to ask ourselves
whether Parker felt he had sacrificed financial success for professional reputation,
(34:47):
because you can get a sense of how severely people
dislike him like as as Pollock points out, there's a
nineteen article from Hampton's magazine that describes his the Painless
Parker Building. Lastly, at the junction of Flatbush Avenue and
Pacific Street is a gigantic brownstone building the fronts Brooklyn's
(35:09):
busiest square. This building, emblazoned with blue signs, is a
monument to the colossal and blatant self puffery of the
most notorious of all the swindling tooth tinkers. It is
the original headquarters of the most conceited Charlatan that dental
quackery has ever known, The Citadel of painless Parker, the
drum cord dentist, The drum cords dentist. Wow, harsh, bro harsh.
(35:35):
And this is so this is published five years after
he's sold his stake in the business, high tailed it
to l A with his family to retire and get
this the ripe old age of thirty five. You lucky,
so ago l I mean, I guess you know, in
the same way that inflation calculators work. That sort of
works for age two five in nineteen ten would have
(35:57):
been more like probably fifty in terms of life expected
seat today maybe not, I don't know, but it is funny.
He definitely made a mint and was able to to,
you know, take off to l A. But the showman's
you know, you can take the man out of the show,
but you can't take the show out of the man,
can you, Ben, You can't do it. He got the
(36:24):
itch and realized that there was a market to be
cornered in on the West coast for circus dentistry. Yeah, yeah,
this actually this kind of sounds fun. Uh. So you
go to Santa Cruz and you you would see a
parade in the morning, then a show, a series of
shows in intent that was kind of a hybrid of
(36:48):
circus acts, but then also featured Parker coming out and
telling you how to have good dental hygiene and then saying,
by the way, anybody got a sort tooth? Because I'm
right here, we got the I got the bucket. You
can see the necklace. This is what I do. Uh,
it works again. He's onto something. He's got another empire started,
(37:11):
or a franchise. At least he's got what five five
different offices and five different towns. And Ben, you make
a really good point. You know, he is giving lectures
on dental hygiene, which is pretty forward thinking, despite you know,
his reputation as being a charlatan. I mean, he did
seemingly have a bit of a head start on this
thing that we think of now is so important and
(37:33):
honestly the most important part of dentistry. And Uh. In
the BBC article that I mentioned, where you can see
that fantastic image of the tooth necklace, there's an advertisement
that says this fixed teeth stay fixed longer when kept
clean with painless Parker tooth powder or paste, the product
of fifty years experience. Wait a minute, but he is
(37:55):
thirty five. I don't understand the product. Okay, so maybe
there's just some Charlottean Are you going on the brought
ut the fifty years experience? None better? Ask your druggist
and Ben. You were just in Philly. You know you
went to some museums, but I don't imagine you went
to the Cornberg School of Dentistry museum, which sounds pretty cool.
I love weird old medical tech, and I love I
(38:15):
love old medical tech. I also love museums about very
specific things. That's I don't know why, just like I
love reference works about very specific things. This Philly has
got some weird ones. They've got the Motor Museum, which
I think is a lot of weird at taxidermy and
like medical appliances. And there's a few other kind of
very specific ones in Philly too. For some time I got,
(38:38):
you know, I got lost in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It's just wonderful. It's Laborntine too, so you can find
so many amazing things. But yes, I will put this
on my list for what I returned to Philly. Also,
Parker is taking better care of himself at this point
in his life. He stops drinking, he stopped smoking, and
(38:59):
he's focusing on this showmanship. Eventually he says, you know,
I need to pay I need to be more mindful
of bacteria, right, and contamination. So I'm not gonna do
these sidewalk demonstrations anymore. And he starts screening educational films
(39:21):
about dental hygiene in his office, and people are always
invited to come in for a free check up. But
like like we said before, man, he's made some enemies
because we we mentioned, especially in you know, those earlier times,
his dental extractions often were not painless, right, and there
(39:42):
were people who felt they had been swindled, they felt
they had been sold a bill of goods, and other
dentists were aware that there were angry patients. The American
Dental Association even called him a menace to the dignity
of the profession. Yeah, because Parker really had this kind
(40:04):
of checkered legacy. Or on the one hand, he was
seen as the charlatan and this kind of snake oil salesman.
But on the other hand, he definitely developed some techniques
and some kind of forward thinking ways of looking at
the dental hygiene right that that you know, kind of
persists to this day. And also not to mention the
idea of a precursor to novacaine that he kind of
(40:24):
just invented, uh more or less. But the former dean
of the Temple University, Maurice H. Kornberg School of Dentistry,
Dr Ahmid Ishmael makes a really really good point that
I think is one that is good to leave with today.
Um that he quote serves as a warning to consumers
(40:44):
even today. Scientific evidence must remain the foundation of clinical
care in any health field, otherwise we will be victims
to modern Charlottean's. So I think it's no accident that
that museum we're talking about still has on display a
bucket of teeth and that weird maccabre tooth necklace and
(41:05):
keeps the memory of Painless Parker alive. And there are
other aspects of this story, little facts here and there
that give you even more of a sense of of
Parker's life. He legally changed his first name to Painless,
for example. His and his contributions are you know, undeniable,
(41:25):
even though he could arguably be called a con artist
at different times. Uh. I love the point that the
dean makes there because it's it's an important one. And
if you'd like to if you'd like to learn more
about why this point is so important, I would recommend
checking out our episode on Stuff they Don't Want You
(41:45):
to Know, called Stuff they Don't Want You to Know
goes to the Dentist. We found there's a lot of
opportunity for bad actors when they have somebody in a
vulnerable position like this with with the power and balance,
because you know, the dentist knows what they are doing,
but the patient doesn't really know what no what's going
(42:06):
on in there totally. And the reason he changed his name,
by the way, to Painless Parker was because of a
new law that came about in California preventing dentist from
practicing under anything but their real name, because they believed
that Painless Parker was false advertising, not only because it
was a pseudonym, because it promised painless um, you know,
(42:30):
dental procedures. H So that's why he changed his name.
But he was so very much part of the zeitgeist
at the time that just a couple of years before
he died in nineteen eight, Bob Hope played a character
in a movie called Pale Face with Jane Mansfield named
Peter painless Potter who is a kind of a Huxtery
(42:53):
snake oil dentist um and Parker, you know, lived to
see the picture and loved it apparently, and also it
gave him a little more publicity, which you can't You
can't buy publicity like that. No such thing as bad publicity.
I bet Parker believed, he probably did. He probably did,
but that's not a statement everybody agrees with. We also
(43:14):
want to give a shout out to Michael D. Tola,
who was himself a dentist, who helpefully points out that
Parker was at one point in his career quote more
famous than the president. M h, it's pretty crazy. Yeah,
it's you know, at least he didn't say it. He
probably said it and then had somebody else he put
(43:36):
a plant in the crowd. But did we mention that
the dentists have a particularly unusually high rate of suicide,
particularly in the medical community. There's a there's a couple
of stats from success dot ader dot org. Apparently male
dentists have the highest rate of suicide within the medical
community at eight point two percent, and then female dentists
(43:57):
of the fourth highest at five point to a doctor's
seven point eight seven, pharmacists seven point one nine, nurses
six point five six, But yeah, eight point two percent
for for dentists. It's apparently a thing. And not to
end on a down note, which we won't, but um,
there's a really and if you want to explore this
trend in any more depth, there's a great article on
Vice our dentists really more prone to suicide by Elizabeth
(44:20):
Brown and they quote a dentist saying when you're in
a career where nobody wants to see you, and you're
the last place they want to come back to, and
it's depressing. Um, which is something that painless Parker I
think was trying to, you know, turn on its head
a bit right. Yeah, and this is a this is
a statistic. Uh, you'll see bandied around in various forms
of The doctor you quote makes a good point about this.
(44:43):
I didn't include it in stuff they don't want you
to know as episode on dentistry because we didn't you
want to focus on the tragedy of suicide. There is
some sand to that research. However, let's send on some
maybe some weird, slightly fun slash gross dental facts. Did
you know that there are people getting tattoos on their
(45:05):
caps and crowns, tooth tattoos. They can't do it yet. Okay, Yeah,
that's okay, I guess that. That's so. I guess that
sort of like, ah, maybe the equivalent of getting like
a gold grill or like a diamond encrusted tooth or
something like that of the vanity area of dentistry. Yeah,
I guess so. I guess so. I've also seen this thing,
(45:26):
or I've seen reports of this thing where people are
getting their teeth like colored or decorated the way that
you would fingernails, through some kind of some kind of process.
It's not permanent, at least as far as I know.
But here's a cool ice breaker you can throw out
there next time you find yourself in the dentist's office. Uh.
(45:47):
The average person, over the course of their life apparently
spends thirty eight days total brushing their teeth. Well, hopefully
all of us who have maybe let some of that
dental upkeep fall by the wayside during COVID can look
at that as a as an inspiration to change our ways. Ben,
I want to end with one more fact, if you
(46:08):
don't mind, Uh. The comical dental fact is that cotton
candy was invented by a dentist. There the literal like
bane of of dentistry was invented by a dentist. This
dude named Dr William James Morrison, who uh mental flaws
described as being a man at odds with himself because
not only was he in the dental profession, he also
(46:30):
had a sweet tooth and was sort of a fair
uh you know, part time confectioner. Um. And while you know,
what you would call candy floss has been used for
generations in various cultures. Um, what we would think of
as the type of machine spun sugar cotton candy was
in fact debut at the nineteen four World's Fair by
(46:52):
a dentist. Thanks so much for tuning in, folks, Hope
you enjoyed this one thanks to our super producers Casey
Pegram and the one and only Max Williams. Max, what's
your We forgot to ask you at the top, what's
your what's your take on dentist deal? Are you a
are you an ardent fan of dentistry? So I have
a story in the past where I went a little
(47:15):
too long without going the dentist Like I'm not gonna
say how many years it was on Eric's Is that bad?
But uh, no dentist, they're uh, they're fine people. I
don't like them, but they do an important job. Well,
you you mean you don't like having to go to
the dentist. You're not saying like when you find out
a friend is a dentist, you're like, oh, forget it.
This is oh no, no, no, I am saying that best.
(47:40):
Thanks so much to Jonathan Strickland's a k a. The Wister,
Thanks as always to Gabe Bluesier, research associate. Uh and
thanks to all the dentists out there. You're doing good,
profound uh and often thankless work. And you know, in addition,
the people who get ignored often thanks to the dentistry
assistance thanks to the hygenis. Thanks to everybody who makes
(48:03):
good teeth possible, including including you, folks. Let's all remember
to brush. We'll see you next time, folks. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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