Royal Dental Hospital
former hospital in London
The Royal Dental Hospital was a dental hospital in Leicester Square, London, which operated from 1858 until 1985. In 1859, it opened the London School of Dental Surgery, later renamed to the Royal Dental Hospital of London School of Dental Surgery, which was the first dental school in Britain.
After the hospital closed in 1985, the building was redeveloped as the Hampshire Hotel. It is now part of the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotels chain and is known as the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hampshire Hotel.
History
The hospital was opened on 1 December 1858 as the Dental Hospital of London by the Odontological Society of London. The Odontological Society of London, founded in 1856, was one of the two main dental societies in mid nineteenth-century Britain and supported inclusion of dentistry in surgery. The rival College of Dentists of England, founded in the same year, supported a separate dental profession. In 1857 the Odontological Society petitioned Parliament to allow the Royal College of Surgeons of England to conduct dental examinations and a clause was included in the Medical Act 1858 to allow this by granting a new charter to the college. The Royal College of Surgeons was given a new charter in 1859 and introduced a dental qualification, the Licentiate in Dental Surgery in 1860. The College of Dentists founded their National Dental Hospital in Tottenham Court Road in 1861.
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This entry incorporates text from “Royal Dental Hospital” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.