The Thomas Evans and the Professional Press exhibit is on display through April 12 in the Leon Levy Dental Medicine Library. It’s free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

By neither twentieth nor twenty-first century standards was Thomas W. Evans (1823-1897) a “dentist” or a “doctor.” Licensing procedures and paths into the professions had, in his era, not solidified. If his route to dentistry was unusual, it was not at all unprecedented. After all, he had been awarded a “certificate” from Jefferson Medical College in 1843.

Interested from childhood in dentistry, Dr. Evans had also long been a reader of contemporary dental printed works. Some, naturally, were textbooks or manuals of practice. But he also had access to contemporary professional periodical literature for dentists. Both articles and advertisements from such periodicals are the subject of this exhibition. They illustrate what Dr. Evans, along with other young or mature dentists, would have encountered in this literature.