Painless Parker’s Scrapbook

The ‘Painless Parker’s Scrapbook’ is an illustrated companion to “Painless Parker This is My Story.” 

This book features Painless’ documents and his personal, family and professional photographs, his newspaper ads, articles, and ‘His Confessions,’ and the ‘Occlusion’ tracing Painless Parker’s true life story from his birth to his death through images as in a Scrapbook.


Painless Parker (1872–1952) was a determined and strong willed pioneer dentist who fought for the common folk to receive affordable and readily accessible dental care. He established the marketing of dentistry through showmanship and developed the philosophy of multiple dental clinics. Painless Parker (his legal name) dared to challenge the dental establishment with his flamboyant and blatant advertising . . . 

His youthful and adventurous experiences which began in New Brunswick prepared him for a colourful career as an advertising dentist, who pioneered and then used outdoor dentistry shows to attract audiences. Painless Parker developed his own style of traveling dentistry shows and toured the county fair circuit in New Brunswick before finally moving on to Brooklyn.

The intervening period of his dental career was spent on the East Coast of the United States where he met up with an ex–circus man who became his manager. Together they developed and refined his most outrageous. and revolutionary ideas and methods for dental advertising, and cultivated his very unconventional style of dentistry, based on glitzy promotion and the use of multiple chair dental clinics under his name. At a town fair in New York, he extracted 357 teeth ― all in one day!

It wasn’t until Painless Parker went to the West Coast where its fertile and easygoing lifestyle facilitated his establishment of 37 dental offices and tolerated his flamboyant manner of advertising (not really)! He took his style of dental advertising and the concept of large multi–chair dental clinics to the limit. Many people and former patients on the West Coast still fondly recall the name of Painless Parker and his Painless Parker Dental Clinics.