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I’VE BEEN eagerly awaiting a series of offers I can’t refuse from my
friendly neighbourhood toothwrights, but, so far, not a peep.

The British Dental Association’s annual report for 1989 (a racy resume
of the highlights of the previous dental year, sponsored by a well-known
toothpaste maker) included a few column-centimetres on advertising.

Now, when I was a lad (indeed, only a decade ago, when I was already
a junior wrinkly), any section on advertising in any of the fiats issued
by the moguls of any of the ‘professions’ would have been concerned only
to remind members of the guild that any form of self-advertisement was pretty
well the ultimate professional sin.

I remember the General Optical Council striking an unfortunate Scottish
optician off the list of persons legally entitled to test eyesights and
supply spectacles (and therefore denying him his living) on the grounds
that he had ‘allowed’ his name and place of business to appear in bold type
in the yellow pages of the local telephone directory. Never mind the fact
that anybody searching through the yellow pages for optical aid would be
only too happy to come across an entry in bold type which they might actually
be able to read.

I remember a vet (or it might have been a dentist) who was ‘struck off’
because he kept a pub in his spare time, which amounted to self-advertisement,
because, of course, he would inveigle his beer-swilling evening clients
into bringing their pooches or constipated cows or throbbing molars or whatever
along for his attention next morning.

I remember, too, the General Medical Council arraigning the saintly
Dr Caroline Deys, a missionary for birth control among the masses, for having
acquiesced to the writing of an article purporting to show her medical skill.

What had happened was that a few months earlier the Sunday People had
carried a story headed ‘Their Sex Life in Her Hands’, which was possibly
not quite the sort of thing you’d find at the top of an article in The Lancet,
but it was a straightforward account of the way in which this excellent
and dedicated woman, working for a charity for scarcely more than her expenses,
was performing vasectomies, and being happily accepted as their surgeon
by a steady stream of ordinary working men who had decided that their breeding
days were over.

Deys’s defence rested on the fact that she could have expected no kind
of pecuniary or professional advantage from the publication, and that she
cooperated in the writing of the item because it seemed an ideal way of
bringing a cause in which she fervently believed to the notice of the very
kind of people she most wished to influence.

Because she was so well known and, indeed, admired within the medical
trade, her ‘trial’ was discussed in the medical press, and roundly criticised,
before it happened. In the event, she was acquitted of the crime of ‘serious
professional misconduct’. But it was a damned close-run thing, and, such
are the workings of the GMC, she would not have been arraigned at all unless
a clutch of the medical great and good had already decided that what she’d
done (the facts were not in dispute) was a pretty heinous thing.

Oh my goodness! How times have changed! The British Dental Association’s
note on the subject of trade promotion welcomes ‘a major relaxation of the
General Dental Council’s advertising regulations’, which is providing ‘a
much more exciting environment within which practices can operate’.

Mind you, all promotional gimmicks must remain ‘within the bounds of
professional propriety’. Advertisements must be ‘legal, honest and truthful’.
Dentists may not, for example (and thank goodness), ‘undertake telephone
canvassing’. But we are told that some ‘are already devizing original marketing
methods such as sponsoring dental health handbooks and promotional balloons’.

Balloons? Golly, yes! That is exciting.

So I have been scanning my morning post for envelopes marked ‘Open at
once to secure your chance of winning Pounds sterling 10,000 plus a bonus
prize of a full set of dentures absolutely free if you reply within seven
days’. Or perhaps ‘Two fillings for the price of one when you introduce
a friend or relative to the newest, snazziest dental supersurgery in town’.

So far – nothing.

Come on boys and girls! Where’s your entrepreneurial spirit? It’s a
brave new age. Take advantage of it, and teach us all that going to your
dentist can be fun.