Although almost forgotten today, Dr George Cunningham (1852–1919) was one of medicine’s more colourful characters. Born in Edinburgh, Cunningham studied and travelled widely before settling in Cambridge, where he practised dentistry from the late 1870s until the eve of World War I. As well as being an unusually well qualified and highly regarded dentist, Cunningham was among the earliest and most radical advocates of oral hygiene, a tireless campaigner for better dental care in schools and the armed forces, and an ingenious health educator and propagandist.

Not content with setting up what became the first local authority school dental clinic in Cambridge in 1907, Cunningham also started a Children’s Dental League and a chain of ‘Toothbrush Clubs’, devised dental Punch and Judy shows and magic lantern presentations, and wrote numerous comic short stories and plays for children to spread the message of dental hygiene.

An inveterate publicist, Cunningham seized on the new medium of cinema as the latest channel of mass communication and publicity. A striking example of his work, Came the Dawn, was recently donated to the Wellcome Library. Although only a small part of the original remains, Came the Dawn’s content still vividly reflects Cunningham’s extrovert personality and his long-standing determination to win official recognition of the importance of dental hygiene for public health and ‘national efficiency’.

Came the Dawn is black and white, silent and, in its reduced state, just under seven minutes long. The film begins with shots of two young girls in a dentist’s chair undergoing treatment, followed by a demonstration of good and bad (mostly bad) designs of toothbrushes.

However, the real historical interest of the film lies in scenes highlighting Cunningham’s belief, in the aftermath of the Boer War and the growth of imperial rivalry between Britain and Germany, that dental health was essential to maintaining Britain’s military power. “Four out of five recruits are rejected by the Army because of bad teeth,” says one of the intertitles, before two comic sequences featuring a moustachioed recruiting sergeant who first examines the teeth of a series of potential recruits before turning all but one of them away; he then joins a Scotsman in full Highland regimentals in making fun of a toothless would-be recruit. “You can’t fight if you can’t bite,” says the following intertitle.

Then follow several sections showing open-air dental education work by the Children’s Dental League, the Toothbrush Clubs and the Cambridge Boy Scouts, including a guest appearance by a banjo-playing black minstrel automaton.

Finally, Cunningham himself appears, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and smoking a large cigar, being introduced to a Toothbrush Club of Swedish schoolgirls wearing traditional costumes, whose farewell song is conducted by a tall and rather severe-looking schoolmistress.

The film itself has had a chequered history. According to dental historians, Cunningham invited Pathé Frères to Cambridge in 1913 to make a complete film record of his school dental clinic and oral hygiene campaigning work. However, after its initial screening at the International Dental Federation Congress in Stockholm in 1913, no more was heard of Cunningham’s film until the British Dental Association (BDA) moved to Wimpole Street in 1967, when it was discovered in a large wooden chest which Cunningham had left to the BDA in 1919.

Most of the film had deteriorated beyond hope of recovery, but dental educator and historian H Colin Davis, formerly of the Royal London Hospital,managed to secure a grant from the Oral Hygiene Service, and the National Film Archive was able to salvage about seven minutes of film.

Though only a fragment of the original, Came the Dawn serves to remind us not only, in the words of one of Davis’s intertitles, that “Oral hygiene can be fun”, but also that the history of dentistry forms an important but hitherto largely neglected part of the wider history of health and medicine.