03/09/2026
WHO WAS AUSTRALIA’S FIRST DENTIST?
We believe Joseph Hyams was probably Australia’s first dentist. He was born in London in 1789. In 1813, he was sentenced at the Old Bailey and arrived in Sydney a year later. By December 1814, he was in practice as a dentist. His advertisement in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser read: “JOSEPH HYAMS, Dentist, 31, Pitt-street, respectfully offers his services to the public in the line of his profession—scaling, cleaning, and drawing the tooth, when necessary, without causing pain; and supplying the vacancy with others of pure ivory. Also, corn extracted with ease and safety. Attendance at home or abroad; and charges very moderate.”
Shortly after came Simon Lear, who was born in Amsterdam in 1787. He was convicted at Plymouth in August 1816; he arrived in Australia in April 1817. In 1818, we find him advertising in the “Sydney Gazette”: “Simon Lear, Dentist and Corn Operator, No. 7, Castlereagh-street, respectfully informs the public at large that he makes a perfect cure of corn without pain. N. B., artificial teeth made in a most perfect manner, and the teeth cleansed from the scurvy and other disorders, and brought to a beautiful white.”
On July 29, 1820, the “Sydney Gazette” published an article which had been prompted by Australia’s first medical board to bring people’s attention to the fact that Hyams and Lear were not properly trained and therefore unqualified to practice as physicians and surgeons.
Hyams went back to a life of petty crime and was sent to Moreton Bay in 1827. He returned to Sydney in 1834 and became a ranger of the racecourse in Hyde Park, but eventually had another run-in with the law and in 1843 was sent to Van Diemen’s Land, where he died within a year.
Lear apparently continued to practice as a dentist as well as an oculist, and sold “exotic snuff” as a remedy for headaches.
Source: www.oztorah.com/2010/09/the-first-australian-dentists-were-jewish/