The Fort Dodge Messenger: April 6, 1903
Was Afraid of Tiring Dentist
Mrs. Lennon, of Clare, Shows Unexpected Solicitude for the Man Behind the Forceps
Had Seventeen Teeth Pulled
After Ordeal Was Able to Go and Spend Afternoon in Shopping Before Returning Home
As a perspiring dentist, after considerable muscular effort, jerked out three or four husky molars, Mrs. Lennon of Clare, who had climbed into the chair with a prospect of having seventeen teeth extracted at a sitting, looked up in his face with kindly anxiety, and asked, “Don’t it make you tired to work so hard, doctor?” the perspiring dentist suppressed his sense of the ludicrous, and resumed his tooth pulling.
A record of endurance such as is seldom equalled, was made by Mrs. Lennon, when at one sitting, and without any undue strain on her nerves, she submitted to the removal of seventeen teeth, and later went on and did some shopping, as tho she had done no more than have one filled.
Mrs. Lennon did not seem to feel that she was doing anything out of the ordinary. she would not have believed it, if told that many women, and men too, if obliged to submit to such a strain, would be threatened with nervous prostration. When she was in the chair, and the work was begun, her sympathy was more for the dentist who was doing the work, than for herself, who was called upon to undergo the suffering attendant up on so extended a season in the dentist’s chair.
Mrs. Lennon had her seventeen teeth out, and returned to her home in Clare, with the consciousness that an unpleasant experience was well over, and entirely unsuspecting that she had broken a record in Fort Dodge dental annals.
(Editor’s note: A few days after this article was published, more information came to light regarding the number of extractions possible at one sitting. Mrs. Lennon’s experience, though extraordinary, was no record-breaker.”
The Fort Dodge Messenger: April 10, 1903
Twenty to Thirty Teeth a Day Not Uncommon
Additional Testimony Furnished The Messenger of the Tooth Pulling Proposition.
The articles which appeared in The Messenger regarding the record of eighteen extractions being something out of the ordinary, I wish to say that eighteen at one sitting is a very low number and I happen to know whereof I speak. On the day the Clare lady had eighteen out and broke the record (supposedly) Mrs. A.E. Day, also of Clare had twenty-one teeth extracted in about six minutes time. Just before that Mrs. A.M. McCluctia had twenty-six at one sitting and at about the same time Mrs. M. Jacobson had 22 taken out in a very few minutes. I happened to witness these operations which by the way were performed without apparent pain and no hard work or bluster made over them. The operations were, I am told, the average, and the time in each case only a few moments. This operator also informs me that twenty to thirty teeth extracted at a single sitting is a very common practice with him and that there is nothing serious or wonderful in such an operation.
-A Reader.
