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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 (anesthesia, pedal-powered mechanical drills and other tools, hygenic measures) and lots of organized lobbying to dispel. I'm sure the reputation of dentistry in other European countries must have been similiar. Some of that prejudice might have carried over to the new world, too ?
I'm now imagining a grown man with a child's tricycle hooked up to a drill, pedalling his heart out and trying to keep his arm still enough to get it in a patient's mouth.