Sick to the Back Teeth

According to reports at the weekend, a force of rogue dentists from Ecuador has been plaguing Madrid. Wholly untrained, armed with rudimentary equipment, and operating in distressingly unhygienic conditions, they were plying their trade mainly at the expense of fellow arrivals from Ecuador until the police descended upon them and put them out of business. No doubt their forthcoming trial will show that their principal motive was the hope of making some money. But do not discount another factor that is often at work when people masquerade as doctors or dentists. One or two at least may have been driven by the belief that dentistry was their destiny.

Samuel Bamford was a Lancashire radical and - he would have wished one to add - a poet, who recorded his colourful early life in a wonderful book called Passages in the Life of a Radical. He led the contingent from Middleton, a small weaving town just outside Manchester, which in August 1819 came to St Peter's Field for the political meeting at which 11 people were killed and hundreds injured in what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre.

His allegedly subversive activities brought him into contact with great figures of the day such as Sidmouth and Castlereagh, by both of whom he was questioned, Canning and Brougham; also with the redoubtable Cobbett and the radical leader and chief speaker at Peterloo, Henry "Orator" Hunt. Hunt had once been a hero of Bamford's, but his duplicities and hypocrisies become, as his story progresses, the subject of growing contempt and loathing. Even a letter from Hunt, in Ilchester prison, to Bamford, in Lincoln prison, which Hunt wheedlingly addressed to "Mr Samuel Bamford, the Lancashire poet and reformer", failed to earn his forgiveness. But no less vivid are his portraits of his radical comrades in arms, and most of all that of the man who most of all shared his adventures: "Doctor" Joseph Healey, who led the Saddleworth, Lees and Mossley contingent at Peterloo.

Healey's father, Bamford explains, was a famous cow-leech, much in demand for his services all over Lancashire, who also "dabbled a little in medicines for the human frame". The son, believing himself to have inherited his father's skills, advertised himself "with imperturbable self- complacency" as a surgeon, and especially as a drawer of teeth. Bamford describes an occasion when he and Healey were fleeing from the constabulary when Healey, unable as ever to turn down the chance to perform an extraction, stopped at a house on the way where a mouth was open for his attention, and was apprehended. "I shall not blazon his imperfections," Bamford says of his colleague, but it's clear from his account that the doctor's eagerness was exceeded only by his incompetence.

Much like the poor Ecuadorians of Madrid, most of those afflicted by toothache in Lancashire in those days had no qualified dentist to turn to. Dentistry, like surgery, had originally been practised by barbers, and though it developed as a separate, skilled profession during the 18th century, it was still for most in the early 19th as perfunctory as it was painful (there was no anaesthesia, even for the rich, until the mid-1840s). The appearance of the cheerful, bustling doctor with his tools of trade in his bag must therefore have been, initially, a cause of relief. But not for long.

Bamford describes one occasion when Healey offers his services to a woman in obvious pain. Knowing what's likely to happen, the radical poet waits in the yard while the operation takes place, but soon there's a piercing scream, and he enters the room to find the patient flat on the floor "sputtering blood" and the doctor covered in cream from a mug that was spilled and broken during their struggles.

Someone calls the constabulary. In his enthusiasm, Healey has accidentally extracted two teeth rather than one, but during the constable's investigations he manages to smuggle one back and pack it into the gum of his victim. Eventually, with the constable's mediation, a deal is done. The patient pays the doctor two and six for his services, while the doctor pays three shillings for the mug and the cream. Another lucky escape; but as always, the doctor's faith in his expertise appears undiminished.

By the end of the book Bamford and Healey have fallen out. Bamford, sharing a cell with Healey in Lincoln prison, reproaches him for his antisocial behaviour. Healey picks up a poker; Bamford wrestles it out of his hand and the scuffle ends with the doctor bleeding, he claims, from his lungs. A turnkey is called and establishes that the doctor has nothing worse than a cut lip.

At which point the doctor disappears into history. But by now his term in jail is almost over. He can, no doubt, comfort himself as the prison gates close behind him with the thought that there's still a great big suffering world out there in Lancashire, ready to open wide at his invitation; until it learns better.