Itinerant dentists and patent remedies in the Dutch Republic.

This chapter describes the rise of dentistry in terms of the interaction between a changing medical rhetoric and a marketplace under pressure. During the second half of the eighteenth century, physicians began to take an active interest in surgery. In the corporate health care system of the Dutch Republic, this had far-reaching consequences for itinerant medical practitioners. Because they were pushed out of the market for general surgery, some of them opted for a career in dentistry, an alternative in which the regular profession was hardly interested.