Robert Wooffendale, the making of a reputation

Previous accounts of the career of Robert Wooffendale have presented him as a prestigious dentist in England and a key figure in the development of dental practice in America. English primary sources suggest that this reputation may not have been entirely deserved and that his life-long claim to have been trained by the King's dentist, Thomas Berdmore, may have been an exaggeration of the truth. This paper traces the evolution of his reputation from Cone in 1848 to Cahn in 1971 and stresses the need to return to primary sources in the writing of dental history.