author
Eugene S. (Eugene Solomon) Talbot
1847–1924
A pioneering American dentist and physician, he wrote widely on orthodontics, oral surgery, and the broader medical ideas of his era. His books show both the scientific ambition of late nineteenth-century medicine and some of its more troubling theories.
1 Audiobook
Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results
by Eugene S. (Eugene Solomon) Talbot
About the author
Born in Sharon, Massachusetts, in 1847, Eugene S. Talbot built his career in Chicago as both a dentist and a physician. Records connected with his published work identify him as a graduate of Pennsylvania Dental College and Rush Medical College, and as a teacher of dental surgery and dental pathology at the Woman's Medical College of Chicago and Rush Medical College.
Talbot wrote extensively on teeth, jaws, and developmental abnormalities. Works associated with his name include Irregularities of the Teeth and Their Treatment, Chart of Typical Forms of Constitutional Irregularities of the Teeth, The Etiology of Osseous Deformities of the Head, Face, Jaws and Teeth, Interstitial Gingivitis; or So-Called Pyorrhoea Alveolaris, and Developmental Pathology. He was also the author of Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results, a book that reflects ideas that circulated widely in his time.
Today, Talbot is remembered as an energetic and influential medical writer from the early history of orthodontics. At the same time, some of the broader arguments in his work belong to outdated and harmful nineteenth-century theories, so modern readers often approach him as a figure who is historically significant but best read with context.