Manatee History Matters: Meet Dr. Driscoll, Manatee County's dentist
Dr. Willis E. Driscoll moved to Manatee County for his health in 1884 at age 43 from Bedford, Ind., where he had practiced dentistry. Upon his arrival in Manatee County, he purchased acreage and set out an orange grove and planted vegetables. The newspaper reported in 1913 he grew a sweet potato measuring 2 feet 9 inches in circumference and weighing 14 pounds.
More importantly, he established a dental practice, and for many years was the only dentist between Manatee County and Key West. As word spread there was an available dentist, he began "riding the circuit" to get to his patients on the lower west coast of Florida.
Dr. Driscoll's route included stops in St. Petersburg, Tampa, DeSoto County and south to Lee County if people needed his services. Riding the circuit included advertising when he would be in a certain area, for how long and if he expected to be delayed.
His son, Clarence, a dentist, traveled with him. Sometimes, the men separated to increase their range. Clarence remembered forging swamps infested with alligators by boat with the constant fear of being capsized and losing the dental instruments. Traveling alone on horseback or wagon was not for the faint of heart. Wild animals, gators and lack of lights and lodging made travel treacherous. There are many stories of father and son in the book, "A History of the Practice of Medicine in Manatee County" by Dr. Robert E. King.
Dr. Driscoll was noted for his dental skills and meticulous record keeping. He made extensive notes on his patients. Some notations included his observations on the quality of fillings made of tin and silver, remarking they usually failed while fillings of platinum and gold lasted for years. He often said in his ads: "Crown and bridge your teeth before they are too far gone" as opposed to extraction.
He presented several papers to the state and national dental associations on the topics of operative dentistry, dental mechanics and lining margins of cavities with noncohesive gold. He also sent articles from his travels to the World's Fair in 1900 back to the local paper.
That same year, his wife, Louisa, died. Dr. Driscoll and his son survived the yellow fever epidemic of the 1880s, but the Driscolls lost their 18-year-old daughter, Rosa, to the disease.
Dr. Driscoll later married Almeda Wight, who was a poet and published many items of poetry in the Manatee River Journal. Dr. Driscoll placed a notice in the Dec. 10, 1914, newspaper he had sold his practice to one of the new dentists in town, H.L. Chilson, and was retiring from dentistry due to health reasons. Because of his health, he spent time at Tyree Springs in Tennessee, a sanitarium in Indiana, and went to the Florida Sanitarium at Orlando for an operation for cystitis.
Returning from Orlando, he embarked on a health regimen of no soft drinks, liquor, tea, coffee, drinking while eating and taking in as much water as could be comfortably consumed between meals. He also began chewing his food to be "Fletcherized" and decreased his meals to two a day instead of three. (Horace Fletcher the "Great Masticator" was a health food enthusiast who believed food should be chewed 100 times and people should eat only when they are "good and hungry.")
Dr. Driscoll moved to Manatee County for health reasons and lived for 42 years before his death Dec. 26, 1926, at his home in Manatee at the age of 85. He was survived by his second wife, his daughter. Mrs. A.B. Murphy, of Manatee and son, Dr. Clarence Driscoll DDS, from Bedford.
The innovation of electric drills and dental anesthesia such as nitrous oxide have made dental work more comfortable for patients. But in the early years in Florida dentistry, there was no anesthesia and manual hand drills were the norm. Dr. Driscoll might have felt your pain, but he did not hear your pain; he was almost totally deaf.
Cindy Russell, records librarian for Manatee's Historical Records Library, enjoys jigsaw puzzles, genealogy and needlework. She can be reached at cindy.russell@manateeclerk.com or 941-741-4070.
This story was originally published January 6, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Manatee History Matters: Meet Dr. Driscoll, Manatee County's dentist ."