Text 1: Swimming with turtles in the dentist’s chair, by Isla McLeod

An original contemporary newspaper article.

Royston Toft, 61, had not been to a dentist for twenty-three years. On that visit, he walked out of the waiting room before his name was called. ‘I heard the drill through the door,’ he says, ‘and that was me gone.’

Last month a molar that had ached on and off for a decade finally cracked, and his daughter found him an appointment at a practice in Worcester that specialises in nervous patients. Before he sat down, he was handed a virtual reality headset. While the dentist worked, Royston was swimming slowly over a coral reef, with turtles drifting past and the sound of waves in his ears.

Dentist Hana Baptiste says many adults are so frightened of treatment that they avoid it altogether. ‘By the time they reach us, a small filling has often become an extraction,’ she says. Every first appointment begins with a chat in a room without a dental chair in it, and patients agree a signal, a raised left hand, that stops everything at once.

The headset does not replace the injection. Royston still had a local anaesthetic, with a numbing gel first, and the tooth was out in eight minutes. ‘I was watching a turtle,’ he says, ‘and then she said, all done.’ For the most anxious patients the practice also offers sedation, which leaves them drowsy and remembering very little.

Royston has booked a check-up for March. He has asked for the turtles again.

Text 2: Free teeth day at the dispensary, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report from 1884, a journalist describes a day at a new town dispensary when teeth were drawn free of charge for working girls, using gas to put the patients to sleep.

On Tuesday the committee of the Tanner Street Dispensary, a body consisting chiefly of ladies, held what they were pleased to call a free teeth day, when any girl employed in the town’s factories might have her aching teeth drawn without charge, and under gas.

By nine o’clock the queue stretched from the dispensary door to the corner of the street, and a lady with a list went along it taking each girl’s name, age and employer. Many had walked straight from the night shift at the jam works. One girl of fifteen showed us a cheek so swollen that her eye was half closed, and said she had not slept for a week.

The operation itself was soon over. The patient was seated in a padded chair, a rubber bag and mouthpiece were placed over her face, and in less than a minute she slept. Mr Grieve, the dentist, then drew the tooth, or sometimes four or five together, and within two minutes she was awake again, a little dazed and inclined to giggle, and was led into a side room for a cup of tea.

We confess we went with some doubt of the gas, which is still new to many. Yet when we recall the old method, a pair of pincers and a strong arm, with the poor patient held down in the chair, we cannot but think the ladies have done a good day’s work. By evening one hundred and twelve teeth had been drawn.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what it was like to have teeth treated.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.