At least in Germany, applied dentistry was seen as of even lower rank than surgery, something that did not have to do with professional medicine at all (the vocation of the university-educated medicus). Dentistry was a crude affair practiced by barber-dentists or other non-surgeons, sometimes in public bathhouses (places often associacted with prostitution and their bathmasters ignoble company, legally barred from forming or entering guilds), sometimes in broad public on the marketplace. Dentists were traveling people and quacks, those who break teeth (Zahnbrecher), often failing at proper extraction in the first place. All those prejudices took a long time, real progress in the field (anasthesia, pedal-powered mechanical drills) and lots of organized lobbying to dispel.