By the end of his career, Thomas W Evans had built up a treasury of paintings, sculpture, gold, silver, crystal and porcelain, including a hoard of costly gifts from the British royal family. But he was neither an aristocrat nor a millionaire merchant: he was a dentist. The largesse was showered on him by princes and princesses whose smiles he had restored through pioneering use of nitrous oxide and gold fillings.
Painless dentistry was a miracle, after centuries when the only cure for toothache was extraction without anaesthetic. Evans’ patients – among them half the courts of Europe including Napoleon III, the Prussian and Russian imperial families and the British royals – were spectacularly grateful. His collection includes a giant gold tankard topped with a silver and gold sculpture of St George slaying the dragon, made by Garrard (the world’s oldest jeweller) and given to Evans “as a testimonial of esteem”, as the engraving says, by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. Other gifts from the prince included a hideous gold mounted African tusk – and his wife Alexandra gave a painting of a little dog called Princesse (along with the real dog) to Evans’s wife.
Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III – nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte – gave him a magnificent blue Sèvres porcelain tea set, but she had more than her teeth to thank him for. When the emperor was captured in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, and France proclaimed a republic again, Evans helped her escape from Paris. A painting in the collection, made just 14 years after the drama, shows her rushing from the house, dressed in sober black with none of her famous jewels, towards the carriage, where Evans waits by the open door. Presumably the rioting mob deemed the companion of a dentist (no matter how grand) to be of little account, and they reached Deauville safely, then London where Napoleon was freed to join her in permanent exile.
The dentist’s collection is now coming out of the shadows. Scores of photographs of his distinguished patients are being digitised by the University of Pennsylvania, along with correspondence including an exchange with Queen Victoria’s daughter, who became Empress Frederick of Prussia. The entire collection will eventually be available online, and there are plans for a permanent public display.
When Evans died in 1897, he left his fortune and his collection to create a school of dentistry “second to none” at the university in his native Philadelphia. The handsome Evans building, the centrepiece of one of the oldest university dental schools in the US, celebrates its centenary this year. However, the current dean of dentistry, Denis Kinane, who has led the anniversary celebrations, said the significance of the collection (which was stored for decades in a warehouse) had gradually been forgotten. Soon, however, it will be displayed in the dental school as Evans intended.
Evans left the US to set up a practice in Paris in 1847, and charm must have had something to do with his spectacular array of wealthy clients. He was first called to treat Napoleon III for an appalling toothache in 1850, and soon became a regular visitor to the palace. He was then sent as an emissary, both as dentist and diplomat, to other European royalty.
Evans also seems to have been a genuinely heroic figure. He set up a field hospital and battlefield ambulance to tend to ordinary French soldiers in the Franco-Prussian war, for which he was later awarded the Legion d’Honneur. He demonstrated the use of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, along with a light ambulance wagon he had designed himself.
As well as royals, he befriended a circle of artists in Paris, and owned several works by Edouard Manet. His beautiful mistress, the actress Mery Laurent, was one of Manet’s favourite models, and the inspiration for Odette, Swann’s wife in Marcel Proust’s epic A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Kinane says the collection is crucial to the history of the school. When the building – which Kinane calls a “grand dame of dentistry” – opened in 1915, an entire wing held the Evans collection. A star attraction was the very carriage in which Evans and Eugenie escaped from Paris. In the 1960s, the museum was converted into more clinical space, and the collection scattered, some sold, some loaned out to dusty corners of the university, but most simply put into storage and the door locked.
One spectacular object has already gone on permanent display at the school. It was one of the pieces sold off, but the team tracked it down and brought it back from France – the carriage. It’s a lesson to students that a dentist’s life could not only be industrious and useful, but full of unexpected glamour and excitement.
