May 16, 2022 • 37 mins
This first episode covers the earliest ways humans cared for their teeth, including the belief that demons might have something to do with tooth decay. We move all the way up to the 18th century, as dentistry became a profession in the U.S., including a surprising early practitioner.
Research:
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Shamash". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Mar. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shamash
- Hand, Greg. “IDA GRAY WAS A PIONEERING CINCINNATI DENTIST WHO EARNED NATIONAL FAME.” Cincinnati Magazine. Feb. 15, 2022. https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/article/ida-gray-was-a-pioneering-cincinnati-dentist-who-earned-national-fame/
- Hallmann-Mikołajczak A. Papirus Ebersa. Ksiega wiedzy medycznej egipcjan z XVI w P.N.E [Ebers Papyrus. The book of medical knowledge of the 16th century B.C. Egyptians]. Arch Hist Filoz Med. 2004;67(1):5-14. Polish. PMID: 15586450.
- Lorenzi, Rosella. “Bad teeth tormented ancient Egyptians.” NBC News. Dec. 3, 2009. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34258529
- Faulkner, Raymond Oliver and Dorman, Peter F.. "Ramses II". Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ramses-II-king-of-Egypt
- Jones, Colin. “Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” Past & Present, no. 166, 2000, pp. 100–45, http://www.jstor.org/stable/651296. Accessed 26 Apr. 2022.
- Forshaw, Roger. (2013). Hesyre: The First Recorded Physician and Dental Surgeon in History. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 89. 181-202. 10.7227/BJRL.89.S.10.
- PROSKAUER, CURT. “The Two Earliest Dentistry Woodcuts.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 1, no. 1, 1946, pp. 71–86, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24619536
- Riddell, William Renwick. “Teeth in Olden Times.” The Public Health Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1925, pp. 51–65, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41973265
- “The Story of Flouridation.” National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/fluoride/the-story-of-fluoridation
- Jain, Shruti, and Hemant Jain. “Legendary Hero: Dr. G.V. Black (1836-1915).” Journal of clinical and diagnostic research : JCDR vol. 11,5 (2017): ZB01-ZB04. doi:10.7860/JCDR/2017/17462.9813
- Peck, Sheldon. “A Biographical Portrait of Edward Hartley Angle, the First Specialist in Orthodontics, Part 1.” Angle Orthodontist, Vol 79, No 6, 2009. https://watermark.silverchair.com/021009-93_1.pdf
- Einhorn, Alfred. “ALKAMIN ESTERS OF PARA-AMNOEBENZOC ACID.” U.S. Patent Office. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/3b/3d/29/66b6b947ec1e06/US812554.pdf
- Dummett, Clifton O. “A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THIRTEEN UNHERALDED CONTRIBUTORS TO MEDICODENTAL PROGRESS.” JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, VOL. 81, NO. 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2571621/pdf/jnma00264-0103.pdf
- Montalbano, M.J., Sharma, A., Oskouian, R.J. et al. The ancient Syrian physician Archigenes and his contributions to neurology and neuroanatomy. Childs Nerv Syst 33, 1419–1420 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00381-016-3191-2
- Etter, William M. Ph.D. “False Teeth.” George Washington’s Mount Vernon. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/false-teeth/#:~:text=Contrary%20to%20later%20legend%2C%20none,to%20Washington's%20remaining%20real%20teeth.
- Hyson JM Jr. “History of the toothbrush.” Journal of the History of Dentistry. 2003 Jul;51(2):73-80.
- Wynbrandt, James. “The Excruciating History of Dentistry.” St. Martin's Griffin. 2000.
- Reinberg, Steven. “Even Before Pandemic, One-Third of U.S. Adults Went Withou
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy P. Wilson. Oh, Tracy,
I sure have been in a dentist chair a lot lately.
I don't mind it. I'll talk about this behind in
(00:27):
our behind the scenes. I used to be terrified of
the dentist. Now I'm totally good with it. I'll talk
about my rehabilitation in this way. Um but uh, and
I'm fine. I've just had a lot of various things
happening and getting some stuff caught up, and I'm also
doing some orthodontia stuff, so when one thing goes wrong
(00:48):
that I have to go to both all worked out.
So during one of my visits, when I often sit
and just kind of ruminate, I found myself wondering if
m He's the second would submit to modern dental care
if he suddenly had access to it like everyone else.
I have, you know, heard and read about how he
(01:10):
had some serious tooth problems in his life. And then
that got me thinking about, like, yeah, but what did
ancient Egyptians know about dentistry? Because I knew they were
not like void of it um and it just made
me want to look it up, which is how a
lot of our show start. And then I did look
it up when I got home, and before you know it,
(01:30):
I was so deep in a dentistry rabbit it wasn't
even funny. So we're doing a two parter on dentistry
and oral health this week. Here's the thing, even with
two parts, this isn't comprehensive, not even close. Because talking
about a lot of stuff, uh and and world history
and how different places have covered it, it does, as
(01:52):
often is the case with our shows, it starts to skew,
particularly in the more modern eras to more western world dentistry,
because that's what we have most research in a language
that we can read available to us in. But if
you are a dentist, I hopefully did not leave out
your favorite part or some development related to your specialty.
(02:14):
But please know that this was taking all of human
histories relationship with their teeth, trying to find a balance
of what's relatable information versus getting too deep in the
weeds with medical specificity. So that's a little level set. Also,
just as a heads up in case you are one
of those people who squeamish about dental things. This is
(02:35):
not an especially graphic discussion of dental stuff. We do
talk a little bit about teeth in their wear and
some things that might be painful. Uh, there is a
little bit in today's episode about pulling that might make
you squirm a little bit. It made me squirm a
little bit, but I also had visuals to go with it.
But overall I would classify this as a pretty tame
(02:55):
episode because I do get a little squirmy talking about
dental stuff. So all of that out of the way.
The history of dentistry, like most things that have been
around for centuries or even thousands of years, we don't
have a clear sense of when somebody first tried to
treat oral health issues with anything that might be considered
(03:17):
a precursor to dentistry. We know from people's remains that
early humans seem not to have had a lot of cavities,
relatively speaking, but they did have a lot of other
dental issues, a lot of them being caused by intense
where on the teeth from grinding down foods. I think
(03:38):
that has come up on unearthed before, like the shift
in toothware as people got better at cooking things. Uh.
Prehistoric evidence suggests that it really wasn't uncommon for a
person to grind their teeth all the way down to
the pulp, which would have been incredibly painful. Gum disease
was also fairly common, and dental remain have taught us
(04:00):
a lot about social stratification of even very early societies.
From the beginning, higher status or class usually meant better
oral health, primarily because you would have had access to
better quality food, like what Tracy just referenced, things like
cooking and figuring out how to prepare food. The people
at the top of the social strata, we're getting those
(04:23):
benefits first, so they were not wearing their teeth down
as quickly. But we still, though only have pretty rough
guesses that with the very earliest dental care and procedures
were like Presumably, though natural remedies like numbing salves derived
from flora might have been used for toothaches or gum aches,
a disease tooth might have been knocked out in ways
(04:45):
that probably would have been fairly brutal and likely deeply
uncomfortable for the patient, but better than having a disease
tooth in your head. We do know that as early
as five thousand BC there were efforts to treat toothaches
among the Babylonians. There's a pretty significant gap in understanding
about what was causing toothaches, and that would have hampered
(05:08):
most of these efforts because the Babylonians of the time
believe that the primary things that made their teeth hurt
were demons and tooth worms. According to the legend of
the worm inscribed on a tablet from the period, the
worm appears before Shamash, the god of the Sun, and
in an exchange where the worm asks what the god
(05:30):
will give him to eat, it entreats, quote, let me
insert myself in the inner of the tooth, and give
me his flesh for my dwelling. Out of the tooth,
I will suck his blood, and from the gum I
will chew the marrow, so I have entrance to the tooth.
Toothworm infestations, according to this belief, could be treated with
mashed herbs combined with gum mastic um. There is a
(05:55):
an earlier episode of the podcast saw Bones that talks
about some dentistry history, and one of I think Sydney,
one of the hosts, makes the point that like when
you see a cavity in somebody's tooth, it does kind
of look like a little wormhole. Yeah, I mean I
can see where people got there. Um. But the problem
if you had a toothache, might have instead but a
(06:16):
ghost or a deemon tracy, And if that was believed
to be the case, the treatment was usually prayer or
some sort of offering to appease the spirit that may
have been wrong. That was why it was in your tooth,
was to let you know that you had done something
bad to it. Um. At this point, amulets were also
(06:37):
used as a protective mechanism to shoo away demons that
might cause tooth pain. Between three thousand and four thousand
b c. Instructions for dental care were being recorded in
the Vedas of ancient India. Medical texts from this group
have detailed descriptions of oral anatomy and ways to care
(06:57):
for and treat the teeth and the surrounding issues. And
this includes possibly the earliest description of a toothbrush, in
this case a twig that's frayed. At the end. Sha Shrewda,
who we have an episode on in the Archives, included
a list of sixty five diseases of the mouth and
his writing, and recommended brushing your teeth early every morning
(07:19):
with a cleaning paste made of honey and oil with
other additives. The first person recognized as being a practitioner
of dentistry was a man named heasy Ray. We'll also
see his name as heasy Ros, sometimes all run together
instead of hyphenated like those both were. He was an
official in the court of Joseph in Egypt's third dynasty.
(07:41):
We have an episode on Joseph in the archives, and
heasy Ray was clearly a man who had a lot
of responsibilities. There's a panel from his two Metsakara, which
is carved in Acacia, would lists his various roles King's
confident priest in three different cults, Supervisor of royal scribes,
and Chief of Taxes, but the most important title in
(08:06):
terms of his historical significance his chief of dentists and physicians.
Now you will also see different interpretations of that reference
to dentistry, since that term would not have existed yet.
Various translations include great one of ivories or even cutter
of ivories and others. But regardless of translation, this oral
(08:27):
health care obviously would be nothing like dentistry Today, worms
and demons still blamed for those tooth issues, but this
is important because it establishes a historical record of dental
medicine as a distinct field or a specialty separate from
just more general medicine, and because of this, hes ARAE
Is sometimes referred to as the first dentist. During Hazra's time,
(08:51):
most treatments were aimed at alleviating pain and short term fixes,
because periodontal disease was more common than cavities were. For example,
there were various treatments that involved preparing poultices or packing
materials around a patient's tooth to numb the pain that
they might be experiencing and to stabilize the area. For
(09:12):
some issues like abscesses, an oral rents might be administered,
but these are sometimes substances that would have actually been poisonous,
probably would have gotten rid of any bacteria, but also
cost you harm, which happens in a few instances the
history of dental care. In the centuries following Hesra's death
(09:32):
circuit c there were new techniques that were being developed
for treating tooth decay, although toothworms were still taking the blame.
One treatment approach, which I sort of love, was to
try to smoke out the toothworms using henbane that had
been incorporated into beeswax. But it would be still several
(09:53):
hundred more years before the Hammurabi Code, which has stated
about seventy b C, would establish law us related to
dental issues. This establishes the concept of medical malpractice and
its punishment, and it also sets up laws regarding harming
another person's teeth. If a freeman were to have his
tooth knocked out, the person who caused the injury would
(10:16):
have one of their teeth knocked out in retribution. Knocking
out the tooth of an enslaved person incurred a fine
of silver. So we are about to get to the
Evers Papyrus. But before we delve into that, and a
little aside about the man who started all of this,
Ramsey's the second, we will pause for a sponsor break.
(10:45):
The Evers Papyrus is one of the oldest of the
medical papyri we know of, and it's considered incredibly important.
Dated to the sixteenth century BC, this papyrus got its
name from Egyptologist George Ebers, who purchased the papya riskit
luxur in the eight seventies. This scroll, which is believed
to be a copy of an earlier document, is filled
(11:08):
with information about how Egyptians treated various diseases and conditions.
There are eleven remedies that could fall under the heading
of dentistry, sometimes called the first known text to describe
dentistry practices. Among them, there's packing teeth in a way
that we mentioned a moment ago using barley and honey.
(11:29):
One entry intended to help regrow gum tissue, is translated
as quote. Another to expel eating on the gums and
make the flesh grow, cow's milk, fresh dates manna remains
during the night in the do rents the mouth for
nine days. There are also descriptions of how medical professionals
(11:50):
at the time would install kind of a primitive bridge
using a hammer and gold or silver wire to lash
the teeth together to support one another and opie him
from poppies as recommended as a pain reliever. So as
an aside on Ramsey's two and a bit of myth
busting related to what I talked to at the top
of the episode. Uh, It's long been reported and there
(12:11):
are certainly X rays you can look at of his
skull to show pretty clearly that he had a lot
of almost certainly very painful dental issues going on by
the time he died. But this is not a case
where there was no dental care in his time. That's
often how these issues are framed. UH. He lived and
ruled in the thirteenth century BC, so after the treatments
(12:32):
and recognition of dental medicine that we have mentioned up
to this point. But the bottom line is that that
dental care was just not advanced enough to keep up
with the developing problem of a man in his nineties
whose teeth had been ground down and whose gums were
plagued with issues. Some of those too, is just genetics, right.
Two random people today can give their teeth the same
(12:54):
exact level of care throughout their life and still have
very different oral health for a variety of reasons. Preventative
care in the form of a daily oral hygiene ritual
was also already well established. This was not a case
where this was a cultural ignorant about keeping their teeth clean. UH.
That went back at least to the time of heasy
(13:14):
Ra and possibly even earlier. In ancient China, there was
also a developed concept of dentistry. Early pharmacopeias listing medicinally
beneficial plants, including many that could have been used for
dental health, are dated as far back as b C.
There may have even been earlier versions. These early texts
(13:37):
share some of the same ideas we've discussed relating to
early Egyptian dental ideas, most notably those pesky toothworms. Tooth
pain and degradation are also attributed to the idea of
humors being unbalanced, as well as other causes to treat toothaches.
According to early Chinese practitioners, you could chew on roasted
(13:58):
garlic that had been combined with wor s, radish seeds,
and other ingredients, and then if that failed, a small
dose of arsenic could be administered to the tooth. There
was also the use of acupuncture to treat toothache, and
that was already well established in ancient texts. Hippocrates was
born in four sixty b C. And his work and
(14:18):
writing advanced dental medicine in a number of ways. For one,
he wrote about the importance of separating medicine and medical
practice from ideas of magic and religion. Up to his time,
that idea of a spiritual component to health and illness
had waxed and waned, but this idea of truly secular
medicine was a pretty significant change. The writings of Hippocrates
(14:42):
are also filled with information on densil care and oral health.
He wrote what's possibly the first description of a dental
operation was a tooth extraction using a tool called an
odonte gogan, and that was an early version of dental forceps.
But though epoc Tse was really into some big advancements,
he also thought that men had more teeth than women did,
(15:07):
so his hands on work on the matter might have
been pretty lacking. Everybody actually gets twenty baby teeth and
then twenty mature teeth plus four wisdom teeth. There can
be some variations in that, but it is not based
on sex. Although not everyone's wisdom teeth come in. That's
part of that variation. That does not appear to have
(15:28):
anything to do again with sex, though right, whether your
wisdom teeth appear or not doesn't doesn't matter. Yet one
of our cats had an extra tooth and that was
just random, right, that happened. That does happen to people,
but again doesn't This is this is not a sexual um.
(15:52):
Following Hippocrates, Aristotle was the next notable historical figure in
the Western world to write about oral health. His writing
Departibus and Amalium describes the teeth of pigs in detail.
Like Hippocrates, he still had that false belief in teeth
counts being different based on sex. Y'all, look inside somebody's mouth,
(16:13):
look inside a bunch of different mouths, you'll figure out
you're wrong. But he did offer deeper understanding of how
teeth fit into anatomy, including how the blood, vessels of
the nerves, and roots of the teeth were connected to
the larger circulatory system. Rome developed a lot more advanced
dentistry in the centuries following the writings of Aristotle. This
(16:34):
is where we first see crowns made of gold and
replacement teeth that resembled natural teeth carved from materials like
ivory and boxwood. This also marked a time when there
were several different professions that could treat tooth and gum issues.
Some doctors specialized in dentistry, but you could also go
(16:54):
to a tooth drawer if you just needed one to
be pulled out. Those things were advancing. There were also
still some pretty misguided practices like urine was believed to
be a good mouthwash yucker's first. There are many many
great uses of urine in history, and that, in my opinion,
is not one. Not so much. The first filling that
(17:17):
we know of is attributed to the work of physician
Alice Cornelius Celsus, who wrote extensively about teeth and dentist
dream His fillings, which were made primarily of lead, were
not intended to save the tooth like a filling that
you would have today, but instead just to bolster it
and give it a little more um steadiness so he
(17:37):
could get a grip on it and pull it. He
did advocate for patients, and that he truly believed that
pain from maladies like tooth abscesses that was some of
the worst pain a person could experience in his opinion,
and pain relief he thought should be a goal for
anyone practicing oral medicine. He also recognized that oral health
was a good indicator of overall health. But right alongside
(18:01):
that move forward where some of the more cockamami ideas.
It was not until the first century CE that the
idea of tooth worms appears in Roman texts. That's when
physicians scrimonious largus includes it in a medical formulary. This
description also includes a remedy which is burning henbane and
(18:22):
inhaling the fumes. The ash left behind when you burn
handbane seed buns looks a little bit like worms, and
so that was offered as proof that the worms had
been extracted. And the words of writer James win Brandt,
who wrote The Excruciating History of Dentistry quote not coincidentally,
(18:43):
henbane is a narcotic. Yes, people were easily convinced that
their worms had been extracted because they were high plenties.
Writing is also filled with incorrect information regarding the teeth
in gums, Mostly it seems on from superstitions. He wrote
the teeth contained a poisonous substance that could kill birds,
(19:06):
that there was a worm you could rub on your
teeth to treat toothache yuck, and that scratching painful gums
with a tooth obtained from a person who had died
violently would alleviate discomfort. Just throw all of that right out.
Sounds like I set up for a murder mystery. As
the first century came to a close, Syrian physician our
(19:28):
kidens practicing in Rome, made the connection that toothaches were
caused by damage or disease to the interior of the tooth,
and that led him to perform treatments that could sort
of be considered precursors to root canals. He opened diseased
teeth with a saw to release the so called morbid humors.
(19:50):
So we have spoken on this show before about Britain's
and France's barber surgeons, most recently in our episode about
m Boise parret So to recap by hundreds, barber surgeons
in both countries were performing tooth extractions as well as
other medical procedures. This was a result of many of
those tasks having been forbidden to be done by monks
(20:11):
by the Catholic Church. That had been common practice to
go to a monk for such things before the eleven hundreds,
and then there was tension between these practitioners, these barber
surgeons and medical surgeons. This led to the two professions
eventually being more clearly regulated and defined, and most of
the procedures that barber surgeons were performing were then delineated
(20:34):
as the work of medical surgeons. However, tooth extractions were
one of the exceptions This is why you'll often see
dentistry referred to as an evolution of the barber surgeon trade.
The Little Medicinal Book for All Kinds of Diseases and
Infirmities of the Teeth is sometimes referred to as the
first dedicated book of dentistry. It was written by German
(20:57):
physician Arts New Bookline and fifteen thirty. This book is
meant as a manual for barber surgeons, and it's quite comprehensive.
There are thirteen chapters covering everything from how the teeth
grow to the various issues of decay, impaction, and periodontal disease.
He also includes sections on children's teeth and finishes with
(21:19):
a section on how to retain good teeth. A lot
of this work is really an updated aggregation of the
work of previous practitioners, so not brand new information, but
it's the first time all of that knowledge was collected
together in a sort of a textbook, and included were
instructions for procedures like drilling the teeth and applying gold fillings. Yeah,
(21:42):
still something incorrect info, but uh, the most comprehensive book
about it. Collection of that information that had happened up
to that point. And this book was incredibly popular. As
a consequence, six editions of it were printed between fifteen
thirty fifty three. In fifteen forty six it was reprinted again,
(22:04):
but at that point it became a chapter in a
larger work titled The Medicinal Book for All Kinds of
Diseases of the Whole Body, internal and external, from head
to toe. This book had twelve other chapters which had
previously been separate booklets, all of which had been written
by Arts. New bookline. Coming up, we'll talk about a
problem that has plagued the dentistry trade and humans who
(22:28):
need dental care for a long time. But it is
not a disease that is other humans. We'll talk about
that after we hear from the sponsors who keep stuffy
miss the history class going Unfortunately. Although advancements were certainly
(22:50):
being made in the medieval period and certainly into the Renaissance,
this was also a time when completely untrained people started
to claim to be experts in tooth drawing or tooth extraction.
They would often travel from place to place, setting up
shop just long enough to pull some teeth and make
some quick money before moving on. Although there there may
(23:12):
have been and probably were a few earnest practitioners in
the mix. A lot of this so called profession was
a ruse, while the tooth drawer was keeping a patient busy,
sometimes with completely incorrect care, sometimes even pulling the wrong tooth,
and a cop list was likely rifling through the patient's
personal effects. This was a problem throughout the sixteenth and
(23:36):
seventeen centuries and even into the eighteen. The rise in
quackery caused both an enormous fear of dental medicine among
lay people because there was no pain management, but it
also led to intense distrust, even though true barber surgeons
were theoretically much better prepared than these itinerant pullers. The
(23:56):
only real records we have about these tooth drawers comes
from artwork. There are a lot of European paintings from
this era that show them. For example, there's jon Stein's
one painting, The Tooth Puller. This features a boy having
a tooth pulled and what looks like a market and
there are spectators all around. There's a document on the
(24:18):
table that's visible as the license, but it's shown as
a fake with a comically large seal. This boy looks miserable,
then the children and adults who are crowded around show
a mix of kind of cheerful fascination to dismay. A
slightly older painting titled the Tooth Extraction or sometimes the
tooth Puller, is attributed to Caravaggio. Around this one shows
(24:42):
a man at a table with the puller standing behind
and over him, with a pair of pliers in his mouth,
and what looks like blood is trickling from the patient's mouth.
Five men around the table are just looking on intensely. Yeah.
That um. That second page meaning is especially striking to
me because the practitioner, the tooth drawer, tooth puller, is
(25:06):
staring directly at the viewer and it's just a little
bit creepy. Um. In seventy three, the book that is
recognized as the start of the modern dentistry trade was published.
That was The Schurgian Dantiste the Surgeon Dentist. French surgeon
Pierre Fauchar wrote it, and it established a lot of
(25:26):
the basics that still form the foundations of dentistryam He
recognized that a person's dental health impacted their overall health,
and his book includes a comprehensive system for caring for
healthy teeth, repairing damaged teeth, extracting teeth that were determined
to be beyond repair, and treating gum disease. Since the
(25:47):
father of modern dentistry is French, it makes sense that
the word dentist comes from the French word dn't easte.
The word don't means tooth, so he's a toothist. Fascard
was an outspoken person when it came to untrained and
unlicensed people making their living as tooth pullers, and so
(26:07):
he sought to warn people about those kinds of Charlatan's
so they could seek out qualified healthcare providers instead. He
had pondered for quite some time about why anybody would
choose to have such a person see to their teeth,
and he wrote that he had figured out their system
quote all their cleverness consistent getting hold of some unfortunates
who pushed themselves among the people listening to the promises
(26:31):
of the empiric. These pretend paid sufferers come up from
time to time to the operator, who holds in his
hand a tooth already wrapped in a very fine skin
with the blood of a chicken or some other animal,
introduces his hand into the mouth of the pretended suffer
drops into it the tooth hidden in his hand. Bush
(26:53):
are then described how the tooth drawer would do some
delicate move and the paid fake would spit out the
tooth and the blood, making this whole procedure look very
easy and quick and painless. Naturally, then people would line
up for such a really easy procedure only to learn
that what was going to happen was really painful and
sometimes dangerous. So we're coming up to apart. That is
(27:16):
fairly tame, depending on your level of comfort of such things.
It certainly made me squirm. Uh Fauchar had become a
dental specialist in Paris after learning the fundamentals of dentistry
in the King's Navy, and he wrote extensively about his
dental tools and how they were used. The five he
specified for dental use for the gum lancet, the punch pincers,
(27:40):
the lever, and the one that he described as the
most useful, the pelican. The pelican, named because it's sort
of resembles the pelican's beak, was invented centuries earlier by
Guy de Choliek, and to me it looks utterly terrifying.
It used a lever to remove a tooth. It had
a hooked claw shaped leg that went over the tooth
(28:01):
and another that would push against the gum, and so
they would pull this lever and the tooth would kind
of get pulled out sideways. Fauchar noted in his writings
that if someone did not know how to use it,
the Pelican quote is the most dangerous of all instruments
for drawing teeth. The first dentist known in the European
colonies in North America arrived in the seventeen sixties. His
(28:24):
name was John Baker, and after getting an education in
Britain and Ireland, he left to set up to practice
in the colonies. Started out in Boston, but we don't
know a whole lot about his time there. What we
do know is that in seventeen sixty seven he decided
to move to New York. And we know that because
he placed a notice in the Boston Evening Post to
(28:45):
let his patients know he was moving on, but they
could continue to purchase his dentifics, which was an early
tooth cleaner, at a local shop. He also trained an
apprentice who will talk about him just a moment. Baker
moved around quite a bit. It seems he can be
traced largely through similar postings in papers in each city
as he moved on. We also get a sense of
(29:08):
how established many of the services we might receive from
a dentist today we're already in place through his newspaper ads.
For example, in one advertisement in seventeen seventy one, he
touted that he could cure scurvy in the dums, starting
with a scaling of the teeth, maintain teeth to keep
them white and beautiful, administer fillings, transplant teeth from one
(29:30):
person to another, make artificial teeth, and lastly, he quote
displaces teeth and stumps after the best and easiest methods,
be they ever so deep sunk into the socket of
the gums. You've probably heard the myth that George Washington
had a set of wooden dentures, and he did have
false teeth, but they were not would Dr John Baker
(29:51):
made them originally out of ivory. They were wired to
Washington's healthy, ish remaining teeth. That was before the Revolutionary War,
though Washington had other dentists make replacement teeth in later years.
Some of his dentures were his own teeth that had
been pulled. Some of them may have been bought from
(30:12):
people he enslaved. Yes, um, But the first President of
the United States is not the only notable figure in
US history whose life brushed up against John Baker. Paul
Revere also knew the dentist, but not because he was
a patient. It was because Baker trained Paul Revere in dentistry.
(30:33):
This happened when Baker was in Boston. The intent was
that he would not leave his patients without dental care,
and that Paul Revere would replace him in his practice.
The first ad placed by Revere offering such services appeared
in seventeen eighty six in the Boston news Letter, and
after noting that lots of people lose teeth in a
variety of ways, this notice reads, quote, this is to
(30:55):
inform all such that they may have them replaced with
artificial ones that look as well as the natural, by
Paul Revere Goldsmith near the head of Dr Clark's Worth, Boston.
That notice goes on to say that if you already
got some false teeth from Mr John Baker, Paul Revere
was trained by him, and he will refasten those as
they naturally loosen over time. Revere practice dentistry until seventeen
(31:19):
seventy four, and then he moved on to exclusively making
appliances like bridges or dentures. General Joseph Warren died at
the Battle of Bunker Hill, and when he was disinterred
from the battlefield to give him a more permanent and
appropriate burial, Revere identified the body by that bridge work
that he had provided to Lauren. This was the first
(31:41):
known instance of a post mortem identification through someone's dental information,
and yet another connection to George Washington in dental history.
It was one of his later dentists, John Greenwood, who
invented the first known dental foot engine. This was a
machine that had a treadle taken from his mother's spinning wheel,
(32:02):
so that the dentist could power the rotation of his
drill by rocking his foot to and fro on that treadle.
Greenwood was Washington's favorite dentist. We know this because the
President wrote him a letter saying so in Greenwood at
that point had made three full sets of dentures for
Washington and two partial sets had Washington not died at
(32:24):
the end of that year, it seems a certainty that
Greenwood probably would have continued to be his dentist. The
first dental text published in the US was a Treatise
on the Human teeth, concisely explaining their structure and cause
of decay, to which has added the most beneficial and
effectual method of treating all disorders incidental to the teeth
(32:45):
and gums, with directions for their judicious extraction and proper
mode of preservation, interspersed with observations interesting too and worthy
the attention of every individual. That text was published in
eighteen o one. Although the title was lengthy, the book
was not. It was only sixty eight pages. Many of
(33:06):
those pages were devoted to touting what an amazing dentist
it's author, Roger Cortland's skinner was. It's also laid out
some basic information on dental hygiene, and it's set the
stage for similar works to publish, which was really the
primary way that that kind of information was circulating at
the time. So, now that we're getting a more casual
(33:28):
public education dental healthcare, this is where we're gonna end
Part one, but there is of course a lot more
to discuss, and next time we were going to get
into things like dental chairs. And there's a big old
drama that happens with amalgam done dune, dune done. Um.
Now that we have talked about how people did not
(33:49):
eat refined sugar in ancient civilizations and thus had less
to decay, let's talk about something sugary in our listener mate.
Let's do it uh, and that is pie, which is
with an exclamation point because that is how listener Kelly
titled her email. Kelly writes, Hello, Holly and Tracy, I
(34:10):
just finished your podcast about pie, and I found it
to be absolutely delightful. We are huge pie fans in
this house, but I wasn't always one myself before marrying
my spouse. I rarely ate pie. Afterwards, it's pie at
every gathering. My mother in law is a pie wizard
and often makes cherry, strawberry and many fruit slash cream
(34:30):
variations for every holiday and gathering. I'm inherently impatient, so
without my food processor, creating a pie crust is absolutely impossible.
I also was surprised to know that my pie preference
is more aligned with the British version of apple pie.
My favorite pie in this world is an apple crumb. Pie.
I find the buttery pie crust, the soft, succulent apples,
and crunchy top to be incredibly divine. It took many
(34:53):
years of reading many cookbooks for me to figure out
the best combination of the apple filling. As it turns out,
I use cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg in my pie filling.
I often have a habit of buying more green apples
than I can physically eat, so I make this pie
pretty often. Your episode inspired me to check to see
how many apples I had collected, and sure enough I
had enough to make a pie. Listening to this podcast
(35:15):
while physically making a pie was a delight. I felt
refreshed and I got a delicious pie to eat. At
the end, Kelly also sent recipes so we can make
her pie delicious. Um. I love this. I love the
idea of making a pie. While listening to the history
of pie, I'm suddenly wondering I had never asked you
(35:37):
and meant to in the behind the scenes. Tracy, do
you ever put cheddar cheese on your apple pie? I've
never tried that. I don't think it's something my dad
has always done, and I, when I was a kid,
thought it was a little odd, but then I tried
it and it's delicious, And I have since met other
people that do the same. So I'm wondering if that's
like a regional thing. Yeah, I don't know. I don't
eat enough apple pie really to think about it. I
(36:02):
don't either, but I recommend it. When let's all make
a pie and try it, see, we can do a
b testing. Um, maybe we will use Actually I would
not use this pie recipe because as that beautiful crunchy
top which doesn't work as well like a covered pie,
and you don't want to ruin that. That stuff is delicious. Um,
So if you are making a pie, that sounds great.
(36:26):
If you want to send us more pie recipes, I'm
always collecting and I love them, so please do so.
You can do that at History podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. You can also find us on social media
as Missed in History. If you haven't yet subscribed to
the podcast that as Easy as Pie, you can do
that on the I heart radio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
(36:52):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app.
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy P. Wilson. Oh, Tracy,
I sure have been in a dentist chair a lot lately.
I don't mind it. I'll talk about this behind in
(00:27):
our behind the scenes. I used to be terrified of
the dentist. Now I'm totally good with it. I'll talk
about my rehabilitation in this way. Um but uh, and
I'm fine. I've just had a lot of various things
happening and getting some stuff caught up, and I'm also
doing some orthodontia stuff, so when one thing goes wrong
(00:48):
that I have to go to both all worked out.
So during one of my visits, when I often sit
and just kind of ruminate, I found myself wondering if
m He's the second would submit to modern dental care
if he suddenly had access to it like everyone else.
I have, you know, heard and read about how he
(01:10):
had some serious tooth problems in his life. And then
that got me thinking about, like, yeah, but what did
ancient Egyptians know about dentistry? Because I knew they were
not like void of it um and it just made
me want to look it up, which is how a
lot of our show start. And then I did look
it up when I got home, and before you know it,
(01:30):
I was so deep in a dentistry rabbit it wasn't
even funny. So we're doing a two parter on dentistry
and oral health this week. Here's the thing, even with
two parts, this isn't comprehensive, not even close. Because talking
about a lot of stuff, uh and and world history
and how different places have covered it, it does, as
(01:52):
often is the case with our shows, it starts to skew,
particularly in the more modern eras to more western world dentistry,
because that's what we have most research in a language
that we can read available to us in. But if
you are a dentist, I hopefully did not leave out
your favorite part or some development related to your specialty.
(02:14):
But please know that this was taking all of human
histories relationship with their teeth, trying to find a balance
of what's relatable information versus getting too deep in the
weeds with medical specificity. So that's a little level set. Also,
just as a heads up in case you are one
of those people who squeamish about dental things. This is
(02:35):
not an especially graphic discussion of dental stuff. We do
talk a little bit about teeth in their wear and
some things that might be painful. Uh, there is a
little bit in today's episode about pulling that might make
you squirm a little bit. It made me squirm a
little bit, but I also had visuals to go with it.
But overall I would classify this as a pretty tame
(02:55):
episode because I do get a little squirmy talking about
dental stuff. So all of that out of the way.
The history of dentistry, like most things that have been
around for centuries or even thousands of years, we don't
have a clear sense of when somebody first tried to
treat oral health issues with anything that might be considered
(03:17):
a precursor to dentistry. We know from people's remains that
early humans seem not to have had a lot of cavities,
relatively speaking, but they did have a lot of other
dental issues, a lot of them being caused by intense
where on the teeth from grinding down foods. I think
(03:38):
that has come up on unearthed before, like the shift
in toothware as people got better at cooking things. Uh.
Prehistoric evidence suggests that it really wasn't uncommon for a
person to grind their teeth all the way down to
the pulp, which would have been incredibly painful. Gum disease
was also fairly common, and dental remain have taught us
(04:00):
a lot about social stratification of even very early societies.
From the beginning, higher status or class usually meant better
oral health, primarily because you would have had access to
better quality food, like what Tracy just referenced, things like
cooking and figuring out how to prepare food. The people
at the top of the social strata, we're getting those
(04:23):
benefits first, so they were not wearing their teeth down
as quickly. But we still, though only have pretty rough
guesses that with the very earliest dental care and procedures
were like Presumably, though natural remedies like numbing salves derived
from flora might have been used for toothaches or gum aches,
a disease tooth might have been knocked out in ways
(04:45):
that probably would have been fairly brutal and likely deeply
uncomfortable for the patient, but better than having a disease
tooth in your head. We do know that as early
as five thousand BC there were efforts to treat toothaches
among the Babylonians. There's a pretty significant gap in understanding
about what was causing toothaches, and that would have hampered
(05:08):
most of these efforts because the Babylonians of the time
believe that the primary things that made their teeth hurt
were demons and tooth worms. According to the legend of
the worm inscribed on a tablet from the period, the
worm appears before Shamash, the god of the Sun, and
in an exchange where the worm asks what the god
(05:30):
will give him to eat, it entreats, quote, let me
insert myself in the inner of the tooth, and give
me his flesh for my dwelling. Out of the tooth,
I will suck his blood, and from the gum I
will chew the marrow, so I have entrance to the tooth.
Toothworm infestations, according to this belief, could be treated with
mashed herbs combined with gum mastic um. There is a
(05:55):
an earlier episode of the podcast saw Bones that talks
about some dentistry history, and one of I think Sydney,
one of the hosts, makes the point that like when
you see a cavity in somebody's tooth, it does kind
of look like a little wormhole. Yeah, I mean I
can see where people got there. Um. But the problem
if you had a toothache, might have instead but a
(06:16):
ghost or a deemon tracy, And if that was believed
to be the case, the treatment was usually prayer or
some sort of offering to appease the spirit that may
have been wrong. That was why it was in your tooth,
was to let you know that you had done something
bad to it. Um. At this point, amulets were also
(06:37):
used as a protective mechanism to shoo away demons that
might cause tooth pain. Between three thousand and four thousand
b c. Instructions for dental care were being recorded in
the Vedas of ancient India. Medical texts from this group
have detailed descriptions of oral anatomy and ways to care
(06:57):
for and treat the teeth and the surrounding issues. And
this includes possibly the earliest description of a toothbrush, in
this case a twig that's frayed. At the end. Sha Shrewda,
who we have an episode on in the Archives, included
a list of sixty five diseases of the mouth and
his writing, and recommended brushing your teeth early every morning
(07:19):
with a cleaning paste made of honey and oil with
other additives. The first person recognized as being a practitioner
of dentistry was a man named heasy Ray. We'll also
see his name as heasy Ros, sometimes all run together
instead of hyphenated like those both were. He was an
official in the court of Joseph in Egypt's third dynasty.
(07:41):
We have an episode on Joseph in the archives, and
heasy Ray was clearly a man who had a lot
of responsibilities. There's a panel from his two Metsakara, which
is carved in Acacia, would lists his various roles King's
confident priest in three different cults, Supervisor of royal scribes,
and Chief of Taxes, but the most important title in
(08:06):
terms of his historical significance his chief of dentists and physicians.
Now you will also see different interpretations of that reference
to dentistry, since that term would not have existed yet.
Various translations include great one of ivories or even cutter
of ivories and others. But regardless of translation, this oral
(08:27):
health care obviously would be nothing like dentistry Today, worms
and demons still blamed for those tooth issues, but this
is important because it establishes a historical record of dental
medicine as a distinct field or a specialty separate from
just more general medicine, and because of this, hes ARAE
Is sometimes referred to as the first dentist. During Hazra's time,
(08:51):
most treatments were aimed at alleviating pain and short term fixes,
because periodontal disease was more common than cavities were. For example,
there were various treatments that involved preparing poultices or packing
materials around a patient's tooth to numb the pain that
they might be experiencing and to stabilize the area. For
(09:12):
some issues like abscesses, an oral rents might be administered,
but these are sometimes substances that would have actually been poisonous,
probably would have gotten rid of any bacteria, but also
cost you harm, which happens in a few instances the
history of dental care. In the centuries following Hesra's death
(09:32):
circuit c there were new techniques that were being developed
for treating tooth decay, although toothworms were still taking the blame.
One treatment approach, which I sort of love, was to
try to smoke out the toothworms using henbane that had
been incorporated into beeswax. But it would be still several
(09:53):
hundred more years before the Hammurabi Code, which has stated
about seventy b C, would establish law us related to
dental issues. This establishes the concept of medical malpractice and
its punishment, and it also sets up laws regarding harming
another person's teeth. If a freeman were to have his
tooth knocked out, the person who caused the injury would
(10:16):
have one of their teeth knocked out in retribution. Knocking
out the tooth of an enslaved person incurred a fine
of silver. So we are about to get to the
Evers Papyrus. But before we delve into that, and a
little aside about the man who started all of this,
Ramsey's the second, we will pause for a sponsor break.
(10:45):
The Evers Papyrus is one of the oldest of the
medical papyri we know of, and it's considered incredibly important.
Dated to the sixteenth century BC, this papyrus got its
name from Egyptologist George Ebers, who purchased the papya riskit
luxur in the eight seventies. This scroll, which is believed
to be a copy of an earlier document, is filled
(11:08):
with information about how Egyptians treated various diseases and conditions.
There are eleven remedies that could fall under the heading
of dentistry, sometimes called the first known text to describe
dentistry practices. Among them, there's packing teeth in a way
that we mentioned a moment ago using barley and honey.
(11:29):
One entry intended to help regrow gum tissue, is translated
as quote. Another to expel eating on the gums and
make the flesh grow, cow's milk, fresh dates manna remains
during the night in the do rents the mouth for
nine days. There are also descriptions of how medical professionals
(11:50):
at the time would install kind of a primitive bridge
using a hammer and gold or silver wire to lash
the teeth together to support one another and opie him
from poppies as recommended as a pain reliever. So as
an aside on Ramsey's two and a bit of myth
busting related to what I talked to at the top
of the episode. Uh, It's long been reported and there
(12:11):
are certainly X rays you can look at of his
skull to show pretty clearly that he had a lot
of almost certainly very painful dental issues going on by
the time he died. But this is not a case
where there was no dental care in his time. That's
often how these issues are framed. UH. He lived and
ruled in the thirteenth century BC, so after the treatments
(12:32):
and recognition of dental medicine that we have mentioned up
to this point. But the bottom line is that that
dental care was just not advanced enough to keep up
with the developing problem of a man in his nineties
whose teeth had been ground down and whose gums were
plagued with issues. Some of those too, is just genetics, right.
Two random people today can give their teeth the same
(12:54):
exact level of care throughout their life and still have
very different oral health for a variety of reasons. Preventative
care in the form of a daily oral hygiene ritual
was also already well established. This was not a case
where this was a cultural ignorant about keeping their teeth clean. UH.
That went back at least to the time of heasy
(13:14):
Ra and possibly even earlier. In ancient China, there was
also a developed concept of dentistry. Early pharmacopeias listing medicinally
beneficial plants, including many that could have been used for
dental health, are dated as far back as b C.
There may have even been earlier versions. These early texts
(13:37):
share some of the same ideas we've discussed relating to
early Egyptian dental ideas, most notably those pesky toothworms. Tooth
pain and degradation are also attributed to the idea of
humors being unbalanced, as well as other causes to treat toothaches.
According to early Chinese practitioners, you could chew on roasted
(13:58):
garlic that had been combined with wor s, radish seeds,
and other ingredients, and then if that failed, a small
dose of arsenic could be administered to the tooth. There
was also the use of acupuncture to treat toothache, and
that was already well established in ancient texts. Hippocrates was
born in four sixty b C. And his work and
(14:18):
writing advanced dental medicine in a number of ways. For one,
he wrote about the importance of separating medicine and medical
practice from ideas of magic and religion. Up to his time,
that idea of a spiritual component to health and illness
had waxed and waned, but this idea of truly secular
medicine was a pretty significant change. The writings of Hippocrates
(14:42):
are also filled with information on densil care and oral health.
He wrote what's possibly the first description of a dental
operation was a tooth extraction using a tool called an
odonte gogan, and that was an early version of dental forceps.
But though epoc Tse was really into some big advancements,
he also thought that men had more teeth than women did,
(15:07):
so his hands on work on the matter might have
been pretty lacking. Everybody actually gets twenty baby teeth and
then twenty mature teeth plus four wisdom teeth. There can
be some variations in that, but it is not based
on sex. Although not everyone's wisdom teeth come in. That's
part of that variation. That does not appear to have
(15:28):
anything to do again with sex, though right, whether your
wisdom teeth appear or not doesn't doesn't matter. Yet one
of our cats had an extra tooth and that was
just random, right, that happened. That does happen to people,
but again doesn't This is this is not a sexual um.
(15:52):
Following Hippocrates, Aristotle was the next notable historical figure in
the Western world to write about oral health. His writing
Departibus and Amalium describes the teeth of pigs in detail.
Like Hippocrates, he still had that false belief in teeth
counts being different based on sex. Y'all, look inside somebody's mouth,
(16:13):
look inside a bunch of different mouths, you'll figure out
you're wrong. But he did offer deeper understanding of how
teeth fit into anatomy, including how the blood, vessels of
the nerves, and roots of the teeth were connected to
the larger circulatory system. Rome developed a lot more advanced
dentistry in the centuries following the writings of Aristotle. This
(16:34):
is where we first see crowns made of gold and
replacement teeth that resembled natural teeth carved from materials like
ivory and boxwood. This also marked a time when there
were several different professions that could treat tooth and gum issues.
Some doctors specialized in dentistry, but you could also go
(16:54):
to a tooth drawer if you just needed one to
be pulled out. Those things were advancing. There were also
still some pretty misguided practices like urine was believed to
be a good mouthwash yucker's first. There are many many
great uses of urine in history, and that, in my opinion,
is not one. Not so much. The first filling that
(17:17):
we know of is attributed to the work of physician
Alice Cornelius Celsus, who wrote extensively about teeth and dentist
dream His fillings, which were made primarily of lead, were
not intended to save the tooth like a filling that
you would have today, but instead just to bolster it
and give it a little more um steadiness so he
(17:37):
could get a grip on it and pull it. He
did advocate for patients, and that he truly believed that
pain from maladies like tooth abscesses that was some of
the worst pain a person could experience in his opinion,
and pain relief he thought should be a goal for
anyone practicing oral medicine. He also recognized that oral health
was a good indicator of overall health. But right alongside
(18:01):
that move forward where some of the more cockamami ideas.
It was not until the first century CE that the
idea of tooth worms appears in Roman texts. That's when
physicians scrimonious largus includes it in a medical formulary. This
description also includes a remedy which is burning henbane and
(18:22):
inhaling the fumes. The ash left behind when you burn
handbane seed buns looks a little bit like worms, and
so that was offered as proof that the worms had
been extracted. And the words of writer James win Brandt,
who wrote The Excruciating History of Dentistry quote not coincidentally,
(18:43):
henbane is a narcotic. Yes, people were easily convinced that
their worms had been extracted because they were high plenties.
Writing is also filled with incorrect information regarding the teeth
in gums, Mostly it seems on from superstitions. He wrote
the teeth contained a poisonous substance that could kill birds,
(19:06):
that there was a worm you could rub on your
teeth to treat toothache yuck, and that scratching painful gums
with a tooth obtained from a person who had died
violently would alleviate discomfort. Just throw all of that right out.
Sounds like I set up for a murder mystery. As
the first century came to a close, Syrian physician our
(19:28):
kidens practicing in Rome, made the connection that toothaches were
caused by damage or disease to the interior of the tooth,
and that led him to perform treatments that could sort
of be considered precursors to root canals. He opened diseased
teeth with a saw to release the so called morbid humors.
(19:50):
So we have spoken on this show before about Britain's
and France's barber surgeons, most recently in our episode about
m Boise parret So to recap by hundreds, barber surgeons
in both countries were performing tooth extractions as well as
other medical procedures. This was a result of many of
those tasks having been forbidden to be done by monks
(20:11):
by the Catholic Church. That had been common practice to
go to a monk for such things before the eleven hundreds,
and then there was tension between these practitioners, these barber
surgeons and medical surgeons. This led to the two professions
eventually being more clearly regulated and defined, and most of
the procedures that barber surgeons were performing were then delineated
(20:34):
as the work of medical surgeons. However, tooth extractions were
one of the exceptions This is why you'll often see
dentistry referred to as an evolution of the barber surgeon trade.
The Little Medicinal Book for All Kinds of Diseases and
Infirmities of the Teeth is sometimes referred to as the
first dedicated book of dentistry. It was written by German
(20:57):
physician Arts New Bookline and fifteen thirty. This book is
meant as a manual for barber surgeons, and it's quite comprehensive.
There are thirteen chapters covering everything from how the teeth
grow to the various issues of decay, impaction, and periodontal disease.
He also includes sections on children's teeth and finishes with
(21:19):
a section on how to retain good teeth. A lot
of this work is really an updated aggregation of the
work of previous practitioners, so not brand new information, but
it's the first time all of that knowledge was collected
together in a sort of a textbook, and included were
instructions for procedures like drilling the teeth and applying gold fillings. Yeah,
(21:42):
still something incorrect info, but uh, the most comprehensive book
about it. Collection of that information that had happened up
to that point. And this book was incredibly popular. As
a consequence, six editions of it were printed between fifteen
thirty fifty three. In fifteen forty six it was reprinted again,
(22:04):
but at that point it became a chapter in a
larger work titled The Medicinal Book for All Kinds of
Diseases of the Whole Body, internal and external, from head
to toe. This book had twelve other chapters which had
previously been separate booklets, all of which had been written
by Arts. New bookline. Coming up, we'll talk about a
problem that has plagued the dentistry trade and humans who
(22:28):
need dental care for a long time. But it is
not a disease that is other humans. We'll talk about
that after we hear from the sponsors who keep stuffy
miss the history class going Unfortunately. Although advancements were certainly
(22:50):
being made in the medieval period and certainly into the Renaissance,
this was also a time when completely untrained people started
to claim to be experts in tooth drawing or tooth extraction.
They would often travel from place to place, setting up
shop just long enough to pull some teeth and make
some quick money before moving on. Although there there may
(23:12):
have been and probably were a few earnest practitioners in
the mix. A lot of this so called profession was
a ruse, while the tooth drawer was keeping a patient busy,
sometimes with completely incorrect care, sometimes even pulling the wrong tooth,
and a cop list was likely rifling through the patient's
personal effects. This was a problem throughout the sixteenth and
(23:36):
seventeen centuries and even into the eighteen. The rise in
quackery caused both an enormous fear of dental medicine among
lay people because there was no pain management, but it
also led to intense distrust, even though true barber surgeons
were theoretically much better prepared than these itinerant pullers. The
(23:56):
only real records we have about these tooth drawers comes
from artwork. There are a lot of European paintings from
this era that show them. For example, there's jon Stein's
one painting, The Tooth Puller. This features a boy having
a tooth pulled and what looks like a market and
there are spectators all around. There's a document on the
(24:18):
table that's visible as the license, but it's shown as
a fake with a comically large seal. This boy looks miserable,
then the children and adults who are crowded around show
a mix of kind of cheerful fascination to dismay. A
slightly older painting titled the Tooth Extraction or sometimes the
tooth Puller, is attributed to Caravaggio. Around this one shows
(24:42):
a man at a table with the puller standing behind
and over him, with a pair of pliers in his mouth,
and what looks like blood is trickling from the patient's mouth.
Five men around the table are just looking on intensely. Yeah.
That um. That second page meaning is especially striking to
me because the practitioner, the tooth drawer, tooth puller, is
(25:06):
staring directly at the viewer and it's just a little
bit creepy. Um. In seventy three, the book that is
recognized as the start of the modern dentistry trade was published.
That was The Schurgian Dantiste the Surgeon Dentist. French surgeon
Pierre Fauchar wrote it, and it established a lot of
(25:26):
the basics that still form the foundations of dentistryam He
recognized that a person's dental health impacted their overall health,
and his book includes a comprehensive system for caring for
healthy teeth, repairing damaged teeth, extracting teeth that were determined
to be beyond repair, and treating gum disease. Since the
(25:47):
father of modern dentistry is French, it makes sense that
the word dentist comes from the French word dn't easte.
The word don't means tooth, so he's a toothist. Fascard
was an outspoken person when it came to untrained and
unlicensed people making their living as tooth pullers, and so
(26:07):
he sought to warn people about those kinds of Charlatan's
so they could seek out qualified healthcare providers instead. He
had pondered for quite some time about why anybody would
choose to have such a person see to their teeth,
and he wrote that he had figured out their system
quote all their cleverness consistent getting hold of some unfortunates
who pushed themselves among the people listening to the promises
(26:31):
of the empiric. These pretend paid sufferers come up from
time to time to the operator, who holds in his
hand a tooth already wrapped in a very fine skin
with the blood of a chicken or some other animal,
introduces his hand into the mouth of the pretended suffer
drops into it the tooth hidden in his hand. Bush
(26:53):
are then described how the tooth drawer would do some
delicate move and the paid fake would spit out the
tooth and the blood, making this whole procedure look very
easy and quick and painless. Naturally, then people would line
up for such a really easy procedure only to learn
that what was going to happen was really painful and
sometimes dangerous. So we're coming up to apart. That is
(27:16):
fairly tame, depending on your level of comfort of such things.
It certainly made me squirm. Uh Fauchar had become a
dental specialist in Paris after learning the fundamentals of dentistry
in the King's Navy, and he wrote extensively about his
dental tools and how they were used. The five he
specified for dental use for the gum lancet, the punch pincers,
(27:40):
the lever, and the one that he described as the
most useful, the pelican. The pelican, named because it's sort
of resembles the pelican's beak, was invented centuries earlier by
Guy de Choliek, and to me it looks utterly terrifying.
It used a lever to remove a tooth. It had
a hooked claw shaped leg that went over the tooth
(28:01):
and another that would push against the gum, and so
they would pull this lever and the tooth would kind
of get pulled out sideways. Fauchar noted in his writings
that if someone did not know how to use it,
the Pelican quote is the most dangerous of all instruments
for drawing teeth. The first dentist known in the European
colonies in North America arrived in the seventeen sixties. His
(28:24):
name was John Baker, and after getting an education in
Britain and Ireland, he left to set up to practice
in the colonies. Started out in Boston, but we don't
know a whole lot about his time there. What we
do know is that in seventeen sixty seven he decided
to move to New York. And we know that because
he placed a notice in the Boston Evening Post to
(28:45):
let his patients know he was moving on, but they
could continue to purchase his dentifics, which was an early
tooth cleaner, at a local shop. He also trained an
apprentice who will talk about him just a moment. Baker
moved around quite a bit. It seems he can be
traced largely through similar postings in papers in each city
as he moved on. We also get a sense of
(29:08):
how established many of the services we might receive from
a dentist today we're already in place through his newspaper ads.
For example, in one advertisement in seventeen seventy one, he
touted that he could cure scurvy in the dums, starting
with a scaling of the teeth, maintain teeth to keep
them white and beautiful, administer fillings, transplant teeth from one
(29:30):
person to another, make artificial teeth, and lastly, he quote
displaces teeth and stumps after the best and easiest methods,
be they ever so deep sunk into the socket of
the gums. You've probably heard the myth that George Washington
had a set of wooden dentures, and he did have
false teeth, but they were not would Dr John Baker
(29:51):
made them originally out of ivory. They were wired to
Washington's healthy, ish remaining teeth. That was before the Revolutionary War,
though Washington had other dentists make replacement teeth in later years.
Some of his dentures were his own teeth that had
been pulled. Some of them may have been bought from
(30:12):
people he enslaved. Yes, um, But the first President of
the United States is not the only notable figure in
US history whose life brushed up against John Baker. Paul
Revere also knew the dentist, but not because he was
a patient. It was because Baker trained Paul Revere in dentistry.
(30:33):
This happened when Baker was in Boston. The intent was
that he would not leave his patients without dental care,
and that Paul Revere would replace him in his practice.
The first ad placed by Revere offering such services appeared
in seventeen eighty six in the Boston news Letter, and
after noting that lots of people lose teeth in a
variety of ways, this notice reads, quote, this is to
(30:55):
inform all such that they may have them replaced with
artificial ones that look as well as the natural, by
Paul Revere Goldsmith near the head of Dr Clark's Worth, Boston.
That notice goes on to say that if you already
got some false teeth from Mr John Baker, Paul Revere
was trained by him, and he will refasten those as
they naturally loosen over time. Revere practice dentistry until seventeen
(31:19):
seventy four, and then he moved on to exclusively making
appliances like bridges or dentures. General Joseph Warren died at
the Battle of Bunker Hill, and when he was disinterred
from the battlefield to give him a more permanent and
appropriate burial, Revere identified the body by that bridge work
that he had provided to Lauren. This was the first
(31:41):
known instance of a post mortem identification through someone's dental information,
and yet another connection to George Washington in dental history.
It was one of his later dentists, John Greenwood, who
invented the first known dental foot engine. This was a
machine that had a treadle taken from his mother's spinning wheel,
(32:02):
so that the dentist could power the rotation of his
drill by rocking his foot to and fro on that treadle.
Greenwood was Washington's favorite dentist. We know this because the
President wrote him a letter saying so in Greenwood at
that point had made three full sets of dentures for
Washington and two partial sets had Washington not died at
(32:24):
the end of that year, it seems a certainty that
Greenwood probably would have continued to be his dentist. The
first dental text published in the US was a Treatise
on the Human teeth, concisely explaining their structure and cause
of decay, to which has added the most beneficial and
effectual method of treating all disorders incidental to the teeth
(32:45):
and gums, with directions for their judicious extraction and proper
mode of preservation, interspersed with observations interesting too and worthy
the attention of every individual. That text was published in
eighteen o one. Although the title was lengthy, the book
was not. It was only sixty eight pages. Many of
(33:06):
those pages were devoted to touting what an amazing dentist
it's author, Roger Cortland's skinner was. It's also laid out
some basic information on dental hygiene, and it's set the
stage for similar works to publish, which was really the
primary way that that kind of information was circulating at
the time. So, now that we're getting a more casual
(33:28):
public education dental healthcare, this is where we're gonna end
Part one, but there is of course a lot more
to discuss, and next time we were going to get
into things like dental chairs. And there's a big old
drama that happens with amalgam done dune, dune done. Um.
Now that we have talked about how people did not
(33:49):
eat refined sugar in ancient civilizations and thus had less
to decay, let's talk about something sugary in our listener mate.
Let's do it uh, and that is pie, which is
with an exclamation point because that is how listener Kelly
titled her email. Kelly writes, Hello, Holly and Tracy, I
(34:10):
just finished your podcast about pie, and I found it
to be absolutely delightful. We are huge pie fans in
this house, but I wasn't always one myself before marrying
my spouse. I rarely ate pie. Afterwards, it's pie at
every gathering. My mother in law is a pie wizard
and often makes cherry, strawberry and many fruit slash cream
(34:30):
variations for every holiday and gathering. I'm inherently impatient, so
without my food processor, creating a pie crust is absolutely impossible.
I also was surprised to know that my pie preference
is more aligned with the British version of apple pie.
My favorite pie in this world is an apple crumb. Pie.
I find the buttery pie crust, the soft, succulent apples,
and crunchy top to be incredibly divine. It took many
(34:53):
years of reading many cookbooks for me to figure out
the best combination of the apple filling. As it turns out,
I use cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg in my pie filling.
I often have a habit of buying more green apples
than I can physically eat, so I make this pie
pretty often. Your episode inspired me to check to see
how many apples I had collected, and sure enough I
had enough to make a pie. Listening to this podcast
(35:15):
while physically making a pie was a delight. I felt
refreshed and I got a delicious pie to eat. At
the end, Kelly also sent recipes so we can make
her pie delicious. Um. I love this. I love the
idea of making a pie. While listening to the history
of pie, I'm suddenly wondering I had never asked you
(35:37):
and meant to in the behind the scenes. Tracy, do
you ever put cheddar cheese on your apple pie? I've
never tried that. I don't think it's something my dad
has always done, and I, when I was a kid,
thought it was a little odd, but then I tried
it and it's delicious, And I have since met other
people that do the same. So I'm wondering if that's
like a regional thing. Yeah, I don't know. I don't
eat enough apple pie really to think about it. I
(36:02):
don't either, but I recommend it. When let's all make
a pie and try it, see, we can do a
b testing. Um, maybe we will use Actually I would
not use this pie recipe because as that beautiful crunchy
top which doesn't work as well like a covered pie,
and you don't want to ruin that. That stuff is delicious. Um,
So if you are making a pie, that sounds great.
(36:26):
If you want to send us more pie recipes, I'm
always collecting and I love them, so please do so.
You can do that at History podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. You can also find us on social media
as Missed in History. If you haven't yet subscribed to
the podcast that as Easy as Pie, you can do
that on the I heart radio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
(36:52):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app.
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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