Musée d'histoire de Lyon - Gadagne

This guide to the Musée d'histoire de Lyon - Gadagne follows Laurent Mourguet, a silk weaver turned itinerant tooth-puller working the market squares of early 1800s Lyon, who built a puppet show to distract his patients from the pain of extraction before anesthesia existed. It traces how the sideshow outgrew the dentist's chair it was built around, and introduces the sharp-tongued character and his companions who came out of it. The original puppets, carved from linden wood, sit upstairs in the museum's collection today.