Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor About this episode This 2022 episode covers Lucy Hobbs, later Lucy Hobbs Taylor, who pursued a career in dentistry before that was recognized as an acceptable vocation for a woman.
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2:10 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated and what's just wrong? Health versus hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health versus Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
2:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. Lucy Hobbs Taylor was born on March 14th, 1833, or 193 years ago today, on the day we are publishing this classic. She was the first woman in the US to receive a degree in dentistry. This originally came out June 29th, 2022. Enjoy.
3:07 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:18 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
3:20 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:22 Holly Frey? So in reading an oldish, mid 20th century biographical article for today's subject, it opened with the line, quote, "The history of most of the major professions reveals that they have been dominated by man and when women sought to invade those sacred precincts of masculine activity, great consternation arose."
3:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Which, which is a funny line. Funny and aggravating.
3:50 Holly Frey? Right. That was definitely, at least to some degree, true for Lucy Hobbs, later Lucy Hobbs Taylor, and her desire to have a career in dentistry before that was recognized as an acceptable vocation for a woman. She's interesting in that she was really just tenacious as hell. She got told no a lot and that did not deter her from her plan and she just kind of found her way around any obstacles to make her own way to get to where she wanted in life. But to be clear upfront, I want to, she often is lauded as the first woman dentist. That's not accurate. We're going to talk
4:31 Holly Frey? about that towards the end of the episode. She's someone, if you listen to our two parter on the history of dentistry, she came up briefly. And she was so interesting that I wanted to do an episode about her. I will also tell you in a comforting way that there is no real talk of any dental scariness here. We talk about fillings a little and one advancement in how they were performed and her kind of being a champion for that, but it's pretty mild. So don't worry if you're squeamish.
4:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Lucy was born Lucy Beeman Hobbs on March 14th, 1833. Her place of birth is a little uncertain. We know she was born in New York State. Most biographies say that it was in Franklin County. That's in the state's northeast corner. If you look at her biography on the Kansas Historical Society's website, you'll see Constable New York listed as her place of birth. That's in Franklin County. But there was another place mentioned in a paper about Lucy that was written in 1951. That document says she was born in Ellenburg. That's in Clinton County, New York, immediately to the east of Franklin County. So we can say upstate New York, pretty confidently, probably Franklin
5:42 Tracy V. Wilson? County, but there's some inconsistency.
5:45 Holly Frey? And we don't know a whole lot about Lucy's childhood. She also had a lot of siblings, nine, according to one source. And there is some indication that her mother died when she was still quite young, but we don't really have a lot of details about it. Her story really picks up in 1849, when Lucy graduated from the Franklin Academy in Malone, New York, with the intent to become a schoolteacher. And she did do that for a decade. She started when she was just 18 and later told a reporter, quote, "I had pupils older than myself who knew about as much as I did, but that did not shake my faith in myself. For I knew, that little informed as I was, we had no better teacher in our district since I could remember." She was described as laughing when she said this.
6:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, I'm as good as any of the others I've had.
6:36 Holly Frey? But she traveled to where teaching jobs were. And as a consequence, she ended up in Brooklyn, Michigan. And she met someone there who changed her life's trajectory. Although I have never found this person's name in any of the things that I read. But the house where she rented a room in Michigan was apparently owned by a doctor. And he and Lucy are said to have talked a lot about his profession because she was deeply interested in it.
7:01 Tracy V. Wilson? She's often quoted as saying that she wished, quote, "to enter a profession where she could earn her bread, not alone by the sweat of her brow, but by the use of her brains also." And her physician friend encouraged her to take that intellectual curiosity and use it to pursue a career in medicine. So Lucy decided to go to Cincinnati, Ohio to enroll in medical school. This was in 1859. She was 26 at the time, and her plan was to enroll at Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati, or EMI.
7:32 Holly Frey? So for a little bit of background on that school, eclectic medicine was a form of medicine that was popular in the late 19th and 20th centuries in the United States. And the focus on this type of medicine was based largely on botanicals and herbal medicine. EMI had been founded in 1842. And for a while, starting in 1850, it graduated some of the first women with physician credentials in the US.
7:58 Tracy V. Wilson? But even though Lucy Hobbs knew she wanted an education at Eclectic, it turned out the school didn't want her. Eclectic had stopped taking women's students in 1857. She was refused enrollment. When she spoke to the college president about the situation, he suggested that maybe she could pursue a career in dentistry instead.
8:20 Holly Frey? And Lucy thought about it and ultimately decided that she would take the college president's advice. So. Her next step was to apply to work with dentists in the Cincinnati area. She needed some degree of learning in the field before she could apply to a formal training program or a dental college, so she began to search for a mentor. And she was told repeatedly that the dental field was for men, and some dentists flat out told her that it would damage their practice if people found out a woman was being taught on the premises. An article written later in her life reported that, quote, "She began a tour of dentist offices in Cincinnati for a place to study." On every hand, she was rebuffed, though one man offered to let her clean his office and
9:04 Holly Frey? look on while he worked, which proposition was indignantly refused.
9:09 Tracy V. Wilson? She finally got an assist from the dean of the Ohio College of Dental Surgery. That was Dr. Jonathan Taft. As a temporary arrangement, while she kept looking for a formal mentor to take her on, Taft told her she could learn in his office for three months. So finally, she found somebody who was willing to work with her. Dr. Samuel Wardle had been one of Dr. Jonathan Taft's students. He had graduated in 1859, and he offered her an apprenticeship in his office. This was a break for Hobbs, but it also meant that her days were spent working and learning, but not getting paid for it. So in the evenings, she would take in sewing to try to keep herself afloat.
9:49 Holly Frey? Yeah, I have so many questions that I never found satisfactory answers to about Dr. Wardle, because he was fresh out of dental school. And I'm like, was it that he was super progressive, or was it that he really needed an assistant for no money because he was just starting his practice?
10:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
10:05 Holly Frey? And how much did Dr. Taft kind of help push that thing together? But at this point in time, there were not a lot of dental programs in the United States. The first had opened in Baltimore in 1840. The second, the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, had opened in 1845. And the third, Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, had opened in 1856. But that was it, three options. Lucy, because of proximity, applied to the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in March of 1861. But even though she had gotten that help earlier from the dean, this application went exactly as well as her application to Eclectic.
10:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Lucy's next move, on the advice of Dr. Wardle, was to just open up her own practice. At the time, it was beneficial to have a degree, but it wasn't required to practice. She opened an office in Cincinnati on March 14, 1861, which was her 28th birthday.
11:03 Holly Frey? That year, of course, was monumental in the United States. The Civil War officially began less than a month after Lucy Hobbs opened her practice. So Lucy closed up her Ohio office almost immediately, and then she moved to Iowa to start over there. Presumably, she thought it was safer there, farther away from the epicenter of conflict. And although Lucy didn't really know anyone in Iowa when she moved there, she must have been providing something that people really desperately needed in opening a dental office in Bellevue, Iowa, that's located in Jackson County on the Illinois border, because she ended her first year there in the black, having put away $100 more than it had cost to run the office and pay for her necessities.
11:47 Tracy V. Wilson? This modest success of her first year running her own dental practice gave Lucy Hobbs the confidence to move somewhere that had more lucrative potential. This time it was McGregor, Iowa, about 82 miles north of Bellevue. And her instincts were correct. She finished her second year in her new profession with a profit of $3,000 on the books. That was no small sum in 1863. Hobbs kept building up her business. She established a very good reputation as a dentist. For the next three years, she stayed in McGregor.
12:20 Holly Frey? And according to a newspaper account written several years after Lucy had arrived in McGregor, Iowa, she had had to work to prove herself to the new community and especially the men of the town. There were definitely some who just did not believe that she, as a woman, would know what she was doing. And so one man decided that he was going to test her by making Appointment and this backfired. According to a write up about it from the Vermont paper, the Burlington Democrat, which came out in 1872, quote, "A young man once entered her office in McGregor and asked her to examine his teeth, knowing at the time they were perfectly sound. She saw the trick at once, but nevertheless commenced to work at his teeth.
13:02 Holly Frey? She bored a hole in a sound tooth and filled it with gold, charging him the usual price. He had to pay well for the experiment."
13:11 Tracy V. Wilson? I don't love this story.
13:13 Holly Frey? I don't either, but I also think it's funny.
13:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
13:17 Holly Frey? I love it and I don't love it.
13:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
13:19 Holly Frey? I'm like, that's malpractice.
13:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
13:21 Holly Frey? But I understand where you're coming from.
13:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Similar, yeah. So coming up, we'll talk about a surprising development in Lucy Hobbs' career. First, though, we will pause for a quick sponsor break.
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15:34 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
16:17 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only
17:23 Tracy V. Wilson? gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
17:43 Holly Frey? In July 1865, Lucy was invited to attend a meeting of the Iowa State Dental Society in Dubuque, Iowa. The president of the society, Dr. Lumen Church Ingersoll, had extended that invitation himself. And while attending, Lucy was asked to join the organization. This was a pretty big deal, and Ingersoll had prepared a resolution for the occasion, which he gave as a speech. It not only noted that Lucy was welcomed by all of the members, but also entreated the larger dental profession to recognize that women are perfectly suited to work in dentistry.
18:18 Tracy V. Wilson? This read, quote, "Whereas the Iowa State Dental Society has without precedent elected to membership a lady practitioner of dentistry. And whereas it is due to her to know that the unanimous vote by which she was elected was not simply a formal vote. And whereas it is due to the profession at large that we make a formal declaration concerning the position we have assumed in our action. Therefore, resolved that we most cordially welcome Miss Lucy B. Hobbs of McGregor to our number and to our professional pursuits, trials, aims, and successes. Resolved that the profession of dentistry involving, as it does, the vital interest
19:00 Tracy V. Wilson? of humanity and the relief of human suffering and the perpetuation of the comforts and enjoyments of life in civilized and refined society has nothing in its pursuits foreign to the instincts of women. And on the other hand, presents in almost every applicant for operations, a subject requiring a kind and benevolent consideration of the most refined and womanly nature."
19:23 Holly Frey? Lucy then made a brief speech of her own thanking the dental society and remarking on how truly meaningful it was after having heard quite the opposite sentiment for so long regarding women in dentistry. The society also nominated her to be a representative to attend the American Dental Association meeting that year.
19:43 Tracy V. Wilson? There was another benefit to having gone to this meeting for Hobbs. Dr. Jonathan Taft, the dean of the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, was also at the meeting and other members of society put some pressure on him to do whatever he could to finally admit Lucy Hobbs to the dental school.
20:01 Holly Frey? And that worked. Taft got Lucy admitted to the school. Of course, at this point, she had been in practice for half a decade, so the school did not make her take the entire load of classes that would normally be required of their dental students. Lucy Hobbs was admitted as a senior. She got credit for all of that work she had been doing. She attended one session and then received the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery on February 21, 1866. She was, as it is often said, the first woman in the world to receive a dental degree.
20:34 Tracy V. Wilson? That same year, Dr. Hobbs wrote a paper about one of the advancements in the field of dental medicine, which she read before the Iowa State Dental Society, before it was published in a dental journal. And in particular, it championed the use of mallets.
20:50 Holly Frey? It read, quote, "The mallet system has become the prevailing system among the best operators. It needs but a few facts to show every thinking mind that this is the best system yet known to the profession for all ordinary fillings, as very few but can be better and more easily condensed than by hand pressure. No proof is necessary to show that anyone can do better work when he can give all his attention to placing the gold in the cavity, stand easy and natural, and have an assistant do the condensing."
21:21 Tracy V. Wilson? So for clarity, mallets have historically been used to knock out people's teeth, but this was a very different situation. The mallets that Hobbs was writing about were small. They were used to shape and condense filling material for a more thorough restoration of the tooth. And this worked a lot better than a dentist just only being able to use their hands to push gold or amalgam into the filling holes.
21:47 Holly Frey? And they weren't using them to tap, but just to shape. Dr. Hobbs described the benefit of mallet use for career longevity as well, writing, quote, "In the old way, the operator was all worn out with a few fillings. The position was such that in most cases, the strength could not be applied in the right direction, but at a great disadvantage to the operator, so that after a very few years of practice, an operator was worn out ere he had arrived at any degree of perfection. Anyone that has tried both systems will admit that more gold can be condensed in a cavity and of course, make a better filling as it is more solid than in any other way. Being driven to place by the mallet, it forms one solid mass."
22:30 Tracy V. Wilson? She also notes that it's better for the patient to have a narrow tool in their mouth than a dentist's whole hand, writing, quote, "With the mallet, I have known the patient to sleep when the operation was long, this showing that it was not very unpleasant."
22:46 Holly Frey? After officially receiving her degree, Dr. Hobbs moved her practice once more, this time to Chicago, to an office at 93 Washington Street. And while living there, she met a man named James Myrtle Taylor, who had fought for the Union in the Civil War, and at that point was working as a train car painter for the Northwestern Railway. The two married on April 24th, 1867.
23:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Several months later, on November 1st, 1867, Lucy Hobbs Taylor sold her practice to another doctor, that was Dr. Edmund Neuss, and she and her husband moved to Lawrence, Kansas, to open a practice there. This practice was housed at 98 Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, and there were two dentists, because Lucy taught James the dentistry trade. And as a pair, they did really well. Their practice was very popular and well-respected, and they stayed busy. They had built the office on land that they purchased and the building they put there also included their residence.
23:44 Holly Frey? After several years in that location, the Taylors decided to build a new home, this time on Ohio Street, and this time it was not a combination home and business. Instead, they moved the dental office to a new and separate location at the corner of Eighth and Massachusetts.
24:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Lucy's time in Kansas was marked by heavy participation in community activities. Lucy joined the Fraternal Order in Service Organization Rebecca Lodge, known more formally as the Women's Associate Lodges of the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows. She joined that in June of 1871. In 1876, the Ada Chapter of the Eastern Star Lodge was founded, and Lucy was a charter member. She really loved Kansas and once said of it, quote, "I am a New Yorker by birth, but I love my adopted country, the West. To it belongs the credit of making it possible for women to be recognized in the dental profession on equal terms with men."
24:40 Holly Frey? We will talk a bit about Lucy's life after she had become a well-known figure in dentistry, but first, we will hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.
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25:48 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
26:31 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
26:52 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
27:37 Holly Frey? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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28:57 Tracy V. Wilson? There was a certain degree of celebrity that came with being the first woman in the US with a dental degree. When Lucy traveled, her mere presence sometimes made the papers. For example, when she went to see family in Ellenburg, New York in 1872, you'll remember that's one of the places she might have been born. But that visit got a write-up. That is the account that we quoted from earlier that recounted the man in McGregor, Iowa, who had decided to test her. And that article opens with, "Mrs. Lucy Hobbs Taylor, DDS, and her husband have been visiting relatives in town for several weeks." And then it continues with a brief biography of Lucy's accomplishments. James M. Taylor died in 1886. It's usually reported that at that point Lucy retired,
29:42 Tracy V. Wilson? but that doesn't seem to be entirely accurate. She did step away from the practice for a bit, but then reopened the offices and kept the practice open for quite a while, although with significantly reduced hours that she kept there. Part of this seems to be just a matter of her patients who called her Dr. Lucy. They would not let her retire. In 1895, To Pika Paper reported, "For years, she had the largest dental practice in the city of Lawrence. And regardless of the fact that she has retired from active business, there are many who will let no one do their work but her."
30:19 Tracy V. Wilson? I know a number of people, more doctors than dentists really, who like retire but still maintain like some level of patient engagement.
30:30 Holly Frey? When another dentist from Lawrence, Dr. C. E. Esterly, died suddenly in 1901, Dr. Taylor and five other dentists in the area placed a note in the Lawrence Daily Journal to honor him. They included a description of him as fostering friendships among the various dentists of the area, writing, quote, "The cordiality of his relations to each of us has taught us much of what one practitioner should be to another, and we feel that our intercourse with him and his friendship toward us has been a moral as well as a professional blessing."
31:03 Tracy V. Wilson? When she wasn't kindly continuing to see patients who felt that no other dentist would do, Lucy spent most of her time working with civic groups and her fraternal organizations. As an example of some of the charitable work that she did in her later years, in 1893, a new home for orphans was being built in nearby Ottawa, Kansas. The Board of Trustees managing the project reached out to the various Rebecca lodges of the state to help the project along in whatever ways they could. A lot sent donations. Dr. Lucy Hobbs-Taylor encouraged her local lodge to help, which it did. But in addition to that, Lucy also selected one of the rooms in this orphan home and provided all the furnishings from
31:46 Tracy V. Wilson? it from her own money. This was in line with a lot of her charity work, both before and after her husband's death, which was often done for the benefit of mothers and children's causes.
31:56 Holly Frey? In 1895, the Chicago Tribune ran an article about women dentists, which opened with, quote, "Ten years ago, a woman dentist was a rarity, even a novelty in Chicago. Today, the city claims at least 15 fair devotees of the profession who are making their way in the most approved American girl fashion." And this article is mostly about the women that are practicing in the city at the time, including one named Mrs. Hattie E. Lawrence, who the paper called a, quote, "pioneer woman dentist," whatever that means. The article gets quotes from a handful of women in the field and shares some of the things that they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis, including people always asking if they were strong enough to pull teeth.
32:40 Holly Frey? But then it traces all of that back to Lucy Hobbs as the forerunner and mentions the quote bitter opposition and foolish objection that she had to endure in her early dental career.
32:53 Tracy V. Wilson? She finally officially closed her office in the early 1900s. According to a real estate transfer announcement in Lawrence's Jeffersonian Gazette, she sold the house on Ohio Street to a woman named Kate M. Spalding for $1,510. She'd already moved into a new home at 809 Vermont Street a few years before that.
33:15 Holly Frey? Yeah, that was both her home and her office because she was still occasionally letting people come over to have work done. In the late summer or early autumn of 1910, Dr. Taylor had a stroke and this left her with some degree of paralysis. I read about it in papers. They did not describe it any more detailed than that. A little more than a month later, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 3:30 a.m. on October 3rd, 1910, in her home in Lawrence, Kansas. The local paper referred to her as quote, "one of the best known residents of this city" in the death announcement. An Arkansas paper reported her death by saying, quote, "Lawrence, Kansas has lost its most
33:58 Holly Frey? widely known and most prominent professional woman in Mrs. Lucy Hobbs Taylor. She was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery on 13th Street alongside her husband."
34:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Before her death, she almost certainly understood her significance as the first woman to earn a degree in dentistry. Allegedly in 1907, she gave her diploma to a friend. That was Dr. Edward Bumgartner. At least that's one version of the story. The Jeffersonian Gazette reported it as though Bumgartner received the diploma when Lucy died. The announcement reads, quote, "Valued as a keepsake, the diploma of the late Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor, whose death took place a week ago, issued to her from the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in February 1866 as the first woman dentist in America, has been
34:47 Tracy V. Wilson? given to Dr. Edward Bumgartner, who has a hobby as a collector. He values the parchment very highly."
34:54 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's unclear, since they don't mention when it was given to him. They kind of make it sound like it was when he died, but then I'm like, well, then who gave it to him? Like, who was the executor that was like, "You can have this"? We know they were friends. They had both co-signed that placement that they had had put in the paper about their colleague that had died. They knew each other before that. Bumgartner was a fellow dentist who had moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1893 after he received his dental degree. And though you would think that technically they were competitors at that point, Lucy had largely stepped back from dentistry. And so she and Bumgartner became friends, and she was something of a mentor to him. And in any case, he kept Lucy's diploma
35:38 Holly Frey? for some period of time, and then he gave it to the Kansas State Historical Society, where it remains in the organization's archives.
35:45 Tracy V. Wilson? In an obituary in the Lawrence Daily Journal, the following was written about Lucy Hobbs Taylor, quote, "Dr. Lucy Taylor was one of the most striking figures in Lawrence. She occupied a position of honor and ability. For years, she occupied a place high in the ranks of her profession. Dr. Taylor was a great charitable worker and did much good in a quiet, unobtrusive manner."
36:09 Holly Frey? By 1900, less than 40 years after Lucy Hobbs opened her first practice, and while she was still alive, there were almost 1,000 women dentists in the United States. Today, there is an award named for Lucy Hobbs Taylor, which is given by the American Association of Women Dentists. It is their highest honor and is given in recognition of outstanding women in dentistry.
36:32 Tracy V. Wilson? So we've talked a bunch about Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor, who really was an impressive woman, but...
36:39 Tracy V. Wilson? It's also important to talk about the way she's almost always framed in write-ups about her. She was absolutely the first woman in the US to receive a dental degree. And the US was the first country with formal dental schools. So it's fair to say that she was the first woman in the world with a dental degree. But she wasn't the first woman to practice dentistry, not even in the US.
37:03 Holly Frey? Some of this leaving out of other practitioners may come down a little bit to semantics. If you only consider someone with a dental degree a dentist, then yes, she would technically be the first woman. But we know lots of people were working as dentists with that job title, including Lucy Hobbs, without the degree.
37:23 Tracy V. Wilson? While researching, Holly found a newspaper syndicated article from 1872. It was in the Frostburg Mining Journal of Maryland. It opens with, quote, "alluding to lady dentists. The Cincinnati commercial does not want the honor of being the first lady graduate with a dental college to be carried off by a Russian countess, but claims that honor for a Cincinnati lady, Mrs. Lucy B. Hobbs, who graduated in 1865. So Russia is not ahead of America after all in enterprising women."
37:55 Holly Frey? So this is just a tiny little blurb in a paper, and it probably wasn't intended to be especially serious. But it does kind of show how easy it is for facts to get a bit distorted when it comes to national pride. I actually tried to hunt down the Russian woman who was apparently being put forth as the first woman dentist. The avenues I went down all kind of dead-ended. There are some possible candidates, but it was never very clear to me.
38:19 Tracy V. Wilson? This reminds me of when everyone on Twitter is responding to something and you can't find what it is that people are responding to.
38:28 Holly Frey? It's very much that. I'm like, well, there is this woman who might have been practicing in the early 1800s, but I, and maybe was certified, but didn't go to a dental school. Like there's, it's a lot of guesswork.
38:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah. And the real kicker there is that there were definitely women practicing some sort of dentistry way before any of these folks. Before Lucy B. Hobbs, before this Russian countess, whoever that might have been, the first woman to practice dentistry in the US that we know of was Emmeline Roberts-Jones, who would have been a contemporary of Lucy's, but she started working with her husband several years before Ms. Hobbs went from teaching to dentistry. A woman named Madeleine-Francoise Calais was practicing dentistry in France back in the 1740s.
39:16 Holly Frey? And centuries before any of them, there were women treating people for dental issues all over the world. Much of it is likely undocumented. Some of it is probably documented and just has not made its way to availability for English speakers. But we know that there were people like prior podcast subject Hildegard of Bingen, writing about oral health, all the way back to the 11th century. And a woman named Hotoka Hime worked with an entire set of dental tools and made dentures in Japan in the 14th century. And women were in various medical roles in ancient Greece and Rome. So though we definitely honor Lucy Hobbs-Taylor as a trailblazer, it's important just to remember that she was making her
39:59 Holly Frey? strides in the context of many others having gone before her. Just want to be very clear that we're not erasing any of the other history of women in dentistry because there's plenty.
40:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Previous Behind the Scenes Minis: Carry-on Bags Next Elizabeth Peratrovich Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated