Whether you visit the oak-paneled reading room in London or browse the digital stacks from your laptop, you are standing on the shoulders of giants—and checking their occlusion.
These are massive, hand-illustrated volumes. Before X-rays, artists dissected cadavers and painted the pulp chambers of teeth by hand. The most famous is "The Natural History of the Human Teeth" (1771) by John Hunter. A first edition of this book is the crown jewel of any royal collection. royal dentistry library
To explore the archives, visit the official website of the Royal College of Surgeons or your national royal medical society. Your search for the pinnacle of dental history begins and ends at the Royal Dentistry Library. Whether you visit the oak-paneled reading room in
Every "new" dental implant design has been tried before in cruder forms. The library contains ivory and gold implants from 2,000 years ago (Egyptian and Celtic). Studying their failures prevents modern surgical errors. The most famous is "The Natural History of