Joseph Fox

Joseph Fox (7 November 1775 – 11 April 1816) was an English dental surgeon, known also as a philanthropist. He was a pioneer writer and lecturer on dentistry. Early life He was the son of Joseph Fox, a dentist, and his wife, Mary Rogers, daughter of John Rogers, a Baptist minister of Southwark, and was born in Crooked Lane, in the City of London. A medical student at Guy's Hospital by 1794, he became dresser to the surgeon Henry Cline. The lectures he gave on the teeth, from 1799, supported by Astley Cooper who was another of Cline's pupils, were the first to be delivered for a London medical institution. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, there was no British precedent, and possibly none worldwide. Fox built up a private dental practice in London. He belonged to the Particular Baptist church of John Rippon, in Carter Lane, London. Education and the Lancasterian system In 1807 Fox was taken by Sir John Jackson, 1st Baronet to hear Joseph Lancaster lecture, in Dover. He then met Lancaster and his supporter William Corston in London, and heard the extent of Lancaster's financial difficulties with his education society. With Corston and William Allen, Fox helped put the society, which became in time the British and Foreign School Society, on a sound basis. The initial committee consisted of: Allen, Corston, Fox, Jackson, with Joseph Foster and Thomas Sturge.