Josiah Foster Flagg

  General notes:

Silversmith and engraver

  Events in his life were:

• Known as an anatomical artist, wood engraver and later dentist. A mark attributed to either him or his father has been located, indicating that at one time he may have worked as silversmith. Listed by other silver authorities. ³

• Apprenticed to a cabinetmaker at sixteen, Flagg soon abandoned that training for study at a school in Plainfield, Connecticut. By 1811, Flagg had become a private student under one of America's premier physicians and surgeons, Dr. John Collins Warren (1778-1856) of Boston. Under Warren's tutelage, Flagg developed skills at dissection and painting and engraving. Warren and Flagg collaborated on a new edition of Haller's classic work, Anatomical Description of the Arteries of the Human Body. Flagg reproduced the copper engravings by wood-cut of his own with such skill that he made a reputation for the book and for himself. A number of years later Flagg also did the drawings for the plates in Warren's A Comparative View of the Sensorial and Nervous Systems in Men and Animals (1822).
Flagg graduated from Boston Medical College in 1815 and set up medical practice first in Dover, New Hampshire, and then in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Apparently restless, Flagg returned to Boston, set up a dental practice and got married. Although he never completely abandoned medicine, Flagg devoted much of his remaining professional life to dentistry and its improvements. In 1828 he designed extracting forceps to fit the shapes of various kinds of teeth. About 1833 he and fellow dentists N.C. Keep developed "mineral teeth" to replace the ivory, hippopotamus and human teeth previously used as artificial teeth -- a major advance in dentistry. Flagg was also untiring in his efforts to expose frauds and "secrets" among "dentists."