#HTE

Unusual Vintage Storage Furniture: Dental Cabinets

Last weekend I was asked, if I could build any piece of furniture with no production limitations, what would I build? Every designer posed this type of question probably envisions something futuristic, but I had something different in mind. A very unusual antique piece of storage furniture. Knowledgeable vintage hunters may have seen one of these before. You probably haven’t, chances are, so I’ll describe it here.

Trays, drawers and intriguing swing-out surfaces characterize antique dental cabinets. In the 19th and 20th Century the bulk of a dentist’s tools were unpowered hand tools, lots of them, and they needed a way to store everything close at hand. Remember that dentistry is exacting work, and with a patient in pain, they’d want to quickly access a needed tool at a moment’s notice, so organization would be of paramount importance. Enter the unsung genius designers who came up with these:

Big whoop, you say, that’s not that impressive. Well, that’s because I started with a weaker one (although it is still cool, check out the slide-out tray on the left side and the swing-out trays on the right side) and am finishing with a much stronger one:

While there are a variety of cool things that slide out…

…my favorite is all of these swing-out trays with different types of organizers:

Even cooler is that they are all removable.

You can pop each one out as needed, to carry it over to the work. This is made possible by this attachment:

This attachment rides on one of many collars–I assume, I can’t quite make it out in the photo–that are mounted to the pivot bar.

Also nifty are these double doors on which to hang things. The second one opens to reveal room for yet more storage.

Lastly it has a mirror up top, presumably so the dentist could check his own pearly whites before heading over to the patient.

Fun fact: Dentistry, in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, was reportedly so expensive that “some people chose to have all their teeth pulled to spare themselves a lifetime of pain. [Dentistry documentarian and history professor Joanna] Bourke says: ‘Having all your teeth removed was considered the perfect gift for a 21st birthday or a newly married bride.’” Absent a gifter, most people probably approached the dentist for major procedures the same way we do today: Dread, Care, Loan.