Recherches et observations sur toutes les parties de l'art du dentiste

First edition of Étienne Bourdet’s major treatise, published in Paris in 1757 in two volumes, eleven years after the second edition of Pierre Fauchard’s Le Chirurgien Dentiste. The work is illustrated with 13 folding engraved plates depicting instruments, appliances and dental procedures.

Contemporary full mottled tan calf. Spines with five raised bands outlined in gilt and decorated with gilt floral compartments; bronze calf lettering-pieces, the volume-numbering pieces partly rubbed away; gilt rolls to the headcaps, blind fillet borders to the boards, gilt rules to the board edges, marbled edges. A few worn corners and occasional minor foxing.

Copy of J. Pilane, doctor of medicine in Dijon, with his manuscript ownership inscriptions on the half-titles.

From the very opening of the work, Bourdet acknowledges his debt to Fauchard, while stating with remarkable candour the distance he intended to take from his master: “M. Fauchard (…) was my guide, and when I was able to walk without a guide, I learned to respect my masters, sometimes to depart from them, and never in any way to diminish the esteem that is their due.” The sentence defines with considerable accuracy the place of Bourdet’s treatise in the history of French dentistry: that of an heir who builds on Fauchard’s achievements, tests them against his own practice, and does not hesitate to depart from them when experience leads him elsewhere.

His researches extend from diseases of the teeth and gums to their replacement and correction. In prosthetic dentistry, Bourdet improved several appliances; for severe gingival disorders he also described the removal or cauterisation of excessive tissue, a procedure in which historians of dentistry have recognised an early form of gingivectomy. He further addressed dental crowding and, in certain cases, recommended the considered extraction of premolars in order to restore the alignment of the anterior teeth.

The book appeared shortly before Bourdet’s rise at Court. Appointed dentist to the Queen in 1759 and attached to the Court the following year, he succeeded after Mouton’s death to the office of operator for the teeth to Louis XV, before being formally appointed Dentist to the King in 1767, the same year in which he was ennobled. His professional success was considerable enough for the succession to his office to be sold in 1783 for 120,000 livres.

Eleven years after Fauchard, Bourdet did not seek to displace the master whose legacy he openly claimed. He began from him, corrected, added, and tried other paths. His own preface expressed it better than any later judgment could: he had learned to walk without a guide.