Dr. Oscar Amoëdo—The Bazar de la Charite, 1898

Considered by many to be the father of forensic odontology, Dr. Oscar Amoedo
was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1863. He began his studies at the University
of Cuba, continued at New York Dental College, and then returned to Cuba
in 1888. He was sent as a delegate to the International Dental Congress in
Paris in 1889. Paris was very appealing to him and he decided to stay. He
became a dental instructor and teacher at the Ecole Odontotechnique de
Paris in 1890 and rose to the rank of professor, writing 120 scientific articles
on many topics (Figure 2.1). A tragic fire at a charity event, the Bazar de
la Charité, stimulated his interest in dental identification and the field of
forensic odontology.
Amoedo was not involved in the postfire identifications,
but knew and interviewed many who were. His thesis to the faculty of
medicine, entitled L’Art Dentaire en Medicine Legale, earned him a doctorate
and served as the basis for his book by the same name, the first comprehensive
text on forensic odontology (Figure 2.2).12 He lectured and worked in the
field until 1936, finally stopping at the age of seventy-three. His accounts of
the identifications following the Bazar de la Charite were given in a paper
at the Dental Section of the International Medical Congress of Moscow and
published in English in 1897, one year before the book was published. In that
paper he revealed that neither a dentist nor physician generated the idea of
dental identification: “It was then that M. Albert Hans, the Paraguay Consul, conceived the idea of calling the dentists who had given their services to the
victims. His counsel was followed, and with excellent results. In the face of
the powerlessness of the legal doctors, since all ordinary signs of identification
had disappeared, our confreres were appealed to … Drs. Burt, Brault,
Davenport, Ducourneau, Godon, and some others.”18