Tooth, Mind and Soul: Dental Modification

When you think of body modification, you probably don't think about your teeth. Yet dental modification takes place throughout the world, from ancient superstitious practices to the modern cult of the Hollywood smile. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore the world of tooth filling, tooth blackening and even tooth extraction as a means to treat illness and transform the soul.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from house stop
works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
have you ever had any like extensive dental work done before? Who?
I mean, any kind of dental work feels extensive? That's true. Yeah,

(00:26):
you know, a little bit here and there. I guess
it's um. It's always a weird issue from me because
my dad was a dentist, and so at least for
a few years there when I was having my had
my my wisdom teeth yanked out. Yeah, it was had this.
It was in a super weird kind of headspace about
it because for most of my life my dad had
been my dentist, and so I'm kind of getting these weird,

(00:49):
like illogical feelings of like, you can't be my dentist,
you're not my dad, yeah, kind of thing going on.
And then and then yeah, it sucks to have your
your teeth worked on. Yeah, And well that's that's a
perfect sort of allegory actually, because you know what we're
gonna be talking about today is the cultural ramifications and
connections to modifying your teeth. Uh. In my case. I

(01:09):
you know, I haven't had a ton done, but I
did have my wisdom teeth taking out as well in
my early twenties, and it was a nightmare. I remember,
you know, I was a poor college student at the time,
and I like had the procedure done and I woke
up and was just like bleeding everywhere, and my girlfriend
at the time had to take me back to her
place where I was supposed to like rest up for

(01:29):
two days, you know. And it's just I wasn't like
equipped maturity wise to deal with that kind of a procedure.
And like weeks later, like I forget what they call
it in dental practice, but like fragments of tooth would
like work their way up through my gums. It was.
It was horrifying. Yeah, when I had mine out, my
my wife picked me up from the procedure and uh

(01:51):
and almost fainted when I took the bloody gauze out. Yeah. Yeah,
Oh that's the weirdest, is the bloody gauze. So we're
gonna be talking about the body modification of teeth in
various cultures around the world, but I think it's a
good starting point for us to sort of compare our
own dental horror stories in Western culture because it's fairly similar,

(02:15):
you know, Yeah, I mean it scenario where a lot
of people have a lot of well deserved anxiety, and
not only because dental surgery kind of sucks and dental
pain sucks, but also because these are the only teeth
you have, and when you start having problems with them,
it's this damning reminder of your mortality. Yeah. I think
it was Tina Fey and her autobiography. She had this

(02:37):
great line that I remember above all else in that book.
She says, the mouth dies first, talking about just as
older and like not not even necessarily procedures you have
to have done, but just like like dealing with like
the breath of an older person. You know, it's like, oh,
my breath smells so bad in the morning. What's going on?
And this feeling that that the rest of me still
feels young, but my my teeth are on this uh,

(03:00):
this irreversible path to the grave. Well, Tina fe then
would probably understand some of the cultures we're going to
talk about today, especially when it comes to tooth extraction
and which is also referred to as ablation, uh, and
the idea that you know, by preemptively yanking them out
of your head, you're sort of cutting off disease at
the past. Yeah. So we're gonna talk about different cultural

(03:21):
rituals and practices that involve the the the shaving of teeth,
the filing of teeth, the sharpening of teeth, the removal
of teeth. But before we even get into the details
of any of these practice, I think it's important to
really connect those practices to our modern dental obsessions. And
we have a wonderful quote here, um that you're about

(03:42):
to read, and it's from one of the sources that
we use on this episode, the Cultural Modification of Teeth
by Clark Johnson, d D, s pH D. Yeah, he
really nailed it, and I think that it provided an
excellent overview that seemed to be mostly for people in
school for dent a practice, but giving them an idea

(04:02):
of you know what without there in the larger scale. Okay,
So he says, an alien visitor to Earth might describe
a tooth related cult now common in many industrialized societies.
The people believe in the tooth cult so unquestionable they
call the Holy Doers doctor. The cult requires an initiation
wherein the holy material objects are fastened to their teeth.

(04:25):
Then they go through to two difficult years of trial
until they emerge purified and the holy material objects are
taken off in a right of passage. These people live
in a society that admires what it sees on billboards
in magazines, in a mystical place they call Hollywood. Both
believers and priests learn their ideals there. The practitioners of

(04:47):
the cult have an obsession with lines and angles. I
really like that that and I think that it's an
important distinction for us to set up to as Westerners.
And we may have some listeners out out there who
are familiar with some of these cultures that we're gonna
be talking about, but as Westerners, we mess around with
our teeth just as much as some of this stuff

(05:09):
that we're about to talk about. That's gonna seem weird
and sort of cult dish, right, Yeah. I mean it's
especially when you look at the cult of the Hollywood smile,
Like how much time and energy goes into the straightening, whitening,
and not only just the physical manipulation of the teeth,
but then placing uh, you know, essentially fake teeth over
those teeth. And sculpting them down and just getting everything

(05:31):
perfectly lined up for that magazine worthy smile. So before
we dive into the first chunk here where we're going
to talk about everything except for the extraction, let's remind
uh you the listener out there, if you're new to
the show, there's a bunch of stuff that we do
other than just podcasting. So Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is Robert myself and Joe McCormick, and we podcast, but

(05:55):
we also do videos. We also write articles. We all
work out of how stuff works, and you can find
us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler where we're all blow
the Mind as our handle, and we curate throughout the
week various weird science, kind of bizarre oddity articles as
well as our own content and Stuff to Blow your Mind.

(06:16):
Dot com is the mothership where you can find most
of that content, right Yeah, So let's get down to it.
Let's just start with teeth. Well, what are some of
the main reasons we have teeth to begin with? Yeah, well,
you know, when we think about it, the essential functions
for our teeth are mastication, speech, and then there's the
aesthetic part, right um, And you know here in Western society.

(06:38):
I know that most of us worry about the whiteness
of our teeth, or the shape of our teeth, or
or how they smell, right, all of those kinds of things.
But there are also anthropological what are referred to as
para masticatory functions of teeth. And this is where teeth
are altered by intent or sometimes in what's called like

(07:00):
an unconscious accident or maybe some kind of behavioral result.
Right now, okay, you might be reeling from this idea already.
You might be one of those people who doesn't like
going to the dentist, and there's that you know, there's
that special kind of person persons. Now you know what
I mean. Isn't there like a particular kind of dentist

(07:21):
you can go to if you have a little bit
of trauma associated with dental practice that's like quiet and
they play soft music and they're like very gentle about
the way they go about things. I forget what there's
a name for it, but I've I've read about it before.
But so if you're that, you know, type of patient
for dentists, you might be reeling from this idea already
about body modification culture in general, especially when it comes

(07:43):
to your mouth. Yeah, Like I know, having read a
lot of Stephen King, especially in my junior nine teen years,
I feel like that was something Keen would come back
to time and time again. It's the image of an
individual with with sharpened teeth because on one hand, it's
it's like they've completely given themselves over to some sort
of animalistic uh quality, and and at the same time

(08:04):
it's irreversible. Right, you've how could you try teeth? Yeah,
And you know, there's our fascination with vampires. There's just
the idea of exactly like kind of what you're mentioning,
like the the canine teeth of the human being sort
of a representation of our primal nature, right, Yeah, because
of course we have teeth for tearing, teeth for crushing,

(08:24):
all important for our omnivorous diet. But h yeah. And
then also it's worth noting that you know, historically teeth
have come in handy for tool use. We don't recommend it,
but it is they can be used as a tool,
and that's another way they can be altered for sure, right,
if you're like chewing on rope or something like. Right,
But then also you know, self defense, um, situations as

(08:46):
well as a last ditch scenario, humans can bite. So
what the important thing to remember here as we're going
over this is that, you know, teeth are artifacts of
human behavior, just in the same way as like our
clothing are, and as such, we modify them in ways
to communicate with others nonverbally. My experience in in communications

(09:09):
theory is this is referred to as artifactual communication. Right,
So whereas like we might brush our teeth or wear
braces or um white in our teeth or something like that,
and other societies they're drilling holes into their teeth and
mounting jewels in them, or they're dyeing them black, right,
or they're ripping them out of their gums. And that's

(09:30):
what we're gonna be talking about today. One theory about
this is that it's a form of costly signaling theory,
and this theory argues that in certain cultures, individuals employ
what are usually costly, monetarily wise signals that help one
receive rewards, and usually that's in the form of a mate. Okay,

(09:51):
so you this is the kind of thing you would
see if you went down to the beach and you saw,
say a dude who has really put in a lot
of time and money on his zeke, and maybe he's
covered with a bunch of tattoos to boot exactly. Yeah,
and even to some Western dentists, these practices that we're
going to talk about today are going to seem totally
weird and and maybe unhealthy in some situations too. Right,

(10:14):
But you know, we have to remember that our own
traditions are considered absolute in our culture, and our ideas
about teeth are just as culturally determined as say the
Balinese or the Acadian French Canadian population we're going to
talk about today. So okay, let's let's get into it.
We've got chipping, filing, staining, banding, jewel inlays. Let's start

(10:35):
with how human beings modify their teeth, right, So what
is so? What are some of the earliest known examples
of this when we look back at the at the
archaeological data. So the oldest known example are the Etruscans,
and this is in seventh century b C. They took
flat gold bands and they would hold their real teeth
or sometimes fake teeth in place with these gold bands

(10:58):
in their mouths. Now, only women wore these devices, and
the surviving pieces have been found in dig sites in
the Italian region of Lazio. Uh. It's thought that these
generally denoted wealth in some kind of high status, because
those were the kind of grave sites that they were
found in. Um. But there's also been examples from ancient
cultures of covering your teeth in gold everywhere from Rome

(11:21):
to China. So that's that's a fairly common thing that
goes back a while. It's not just like a new
fat and of course, yeah, and to your point, continues
on to this day. Yeah. So it's just a perfectly
human obsessions since time out of mind, right, Yeah, I mean,
like the the the current culture of like caps and
grills is especially like similar to these kinds of things.

(11:43):
And here in Atlanta, I mean just downtown Atlanta. There's
several places I used to work down there when I
was working at the university. There's all kinds of places
where you can just walk in and get your grills
set up. Um. So it is a you know, common
cultural phenomenon today as well. With the golden lays. Now,
one of the examples of dental modification that that that

(12:04):
I've found particularly fascinating and have blogged on in the
past is a Balinese tooth filing. So this takes place
in the Indian Indonesian island of Bali. And uh, this
is in in in this particular society. It's those carnivorous
teeth that we've we've touched on already, the canines and incisors.
So these are viewed as sort of you know, be

(12:26):
steel teeth is representing the b steal nature of humanity.
And so here we find tooth filing is a rite
of passage into adulthood and a key indicator of social,
aesthetic and spiritual well being. Okay, and the key here
is that they're not filing their teeth into points. They're
actually filing them down to they're flatter, right right, it's

(12:47):
almost you know, to create a more um you know,
vegetarian dental arrangement. Yeah. They smooth away the thing like
qualities of of the human teeth, and in doing so
they smooth away that the savage aspects of their soul.
That's the approach here. Uh. And ideally the ritualized procedure
is performed by a Brahmin priest, though you can actually

(13:08):
get your local Balinese dentist to manage it as well,
and if you can't afford to filing this is this
is amazing. They are charitable organizations or you may be
able to get a sponsor, an individual to sponsor you
so that you can receive the procedure. Like that's the
cultural way that it is. Yeah, so it's that important society.

(13:28):
And so from what I was reading, my understanding was
that this is a practice that has both localized traditional history,
but then it also has some Hindu uh religious qualities
that got merged into it when Hinduism became popular in
the region. Yeah, it's a it's an ancient custom predates
Hinduism's arrival on the island in the fifth century BC. Uh.

(13:49):
And as often, you know, as the case, the the
old ways merged with the new ways and it becomes
this uh, you know, this hugely important things so important
that if you if you die with un modified teeth,
then then the teeth of your corpse can even be
filed down to ensure your passage into the spirit room.
And you probably don't need a specialist for that at
that point. They can just you know, like your brother

(14:11):
can do it. Yeah, I'm guessing maybe it requires a
little less care and finesse the symbolic power. This is
pretty crazy too, because if anyone out there is familiar
with Balinese art, like then I should be able to
just say, bolly Balinese art and you should get certain
pictures of they're they're more common motifs in your mind,
you know, particularly you see this. There's a character named Boma,

(14:32):
the Son of the Earth, and he's the awards off
evil uh spirits and uh and and he looks like
some sort of a demon to sort of Western eyes,
and he has these big h you know things and all.
According to British anthropologist Anthony Forge, that's a great name
for an anthropologist by the Forge of anthropology. Here he's
noted that this dental obsession manifests itself in the art.

(14:57):
And so you see the teeth of supernatural entities such
as the gods and spirits take on exaggerated, uh be
stual form, you know, giant canines to symbolize the opposite
of desired human qualities. Okay, I'm thinking of like some
of the kind of like um tribal masks that I've
seen from certain Pacific island cultures. Yeah, exactly, that kind

(15:19):
of you know, like huge things because it's beautiful stuff.
But it's interesting how in looking at the way that
the teeth of their spirits are represented in their art. Uh,
Like that reflects too in their their body modification and
the the alteration of their teeth for for purely aesthetic
spiritual and you know, in cultural reasons. Yeah, that makes sense.

(15:42):
And there's a couple of other examples that we're going
to talk about in the episode today where that that's
similar and that the deification of the of the teeth
shows up in visual representations of gods or myths. Yeah, okay, Well,
another brief look here at some people who file their
teeth for dental modification is the I've been people of Borneo, uh,

(16:06):
and they further beautified their teeth by they both blacken
and file it. But then what they do is they
drill a hole in the middle of each tooth and
then place a brass stud in this hole, so every
tooth has like a tiny little breast stud in its center. Also,
the May people of Vietnam, they have their incisors chipped
and ground down to the gum line. Uh. And this

(16:29):
is something that was deliberately done in in terms of
like staining back when they were. This is before it
was Vietnam, when it was referred to as French colonial annam.
I think I'm saying that right, uh, And every person
was expected to have their teeth blackened by what was
quote a very painful process. Um. So for for those

(16:49):
of us who are afraid of going to the dentist,
can you imagine just you know, somebody going at you
with in a lot of cases easier just with like stones.
That's how they're they're filing their teeth down. And then
the blackening usually occurs with some some kind of combination
of like charcoal or plants. Yeah, they're actually one of
the practices in modern Mayanmar is the the chewing of

(17:10):
particular um, you know, root substances to to black to
help black and yeah, well the moy did it as
like a beautification thing basically, and the idea was that
if you didn't do it, you weren't an adult and
you couldn't get married. So nobody again, like it's like
it's our version of the Hollywood smile, right, Like, like
they weren't considered on equal level of maturity until they

(17:34):
had done this, And some tribes even gave their lower
jaws like a saw shape with the filing combination, so
that's kind of interesting, and then meso American teeth filing.
There there was a lot more research on on this
from what I could find, but basically it's a combination
of the filing cross hatch designs like carving cross hatches

(17:54):
into your teeth, and then the jewel inlays as well.
So this was frequent in young adults in what is
referred to as late Classic Mayan sights. And I went
and looked that up to to you know, some kind
of placement here in history. It's around a D five
fifty to eight thirty. Okay. Uh. Many investigators believed at

(18:15):
the time that dental mutilation correlated with high social position,
So we're seeing a theme here, right. This seems to
be going along with almost all of these. It's a
social status. You need to be able to pay a
doctor slash artisan to transform your teeth into the desired form,
which is the same thing that we have today. Yeah. Yeah,

(18:36):
uh So there's a collection actually at the Institute o
National day Anthropologia a Historia in Mexico City where they
have a thousand, two hundred and twelve teeth that's a
very specific ammounity from this period of time. But yeah,
mainly these were filed down with stones. The cross hatch
patterns were carved into what's referred to as the labial

(18:58):
surface of the tooth, and then they would put in
jewel incrustation or inlays um. They're basically grills that aren't removable. Uh.
And they would use all kinds of different stones for this.
They used pyrite, j dite, turquoise, hematite, serpentine, mother of pearl, cinnabar,
or gold set into the surface of the teeth. The

(19:19):
most popular and common where the iron pyrite and the jade. Though,
and the way that they did this, this is the
part that's crazy to me. Like I normally don't have
any problems when I go to the dentist. I'm pretty
cool with them, you know, doing all the stuff in there.
And they could the little suction host and stare at
the ceiling. Yeah. The TV, which always bothers me a

(19:39):
little bit because I don't really want to watch the TV.
I don't know if I want you watching the TV
exactly while you're working on my mouth. Yeah, I've had
people like comment like can you believe that? Like, while
they're working on my mouth, and I'm like trying not
to pay attention to the TV. But yeah, uh so
in Misso America Mayan culture, what they would do is
they didn't of the TV, but they would take a

(20:01):
rotating fine tube of quartz or some other kind of
resistant stone and they would rotate it slowly against the
surface of the enamel of your teeth. They'd add water
in an abrasive powder or sand to help drill it out.
For this inlay, they would possibly use what's called a
bow drill as well, which I looked this up. It
basically looks like what you would think. It looks like

(20:22):
a bow for a bow and arrow, and then in
the middle, instead of having an arrow, there's there's this
quartz tube thing that kind of spins apart sometimes that
used as a fire making up. Yeah, exactly, yep. Uh.
And so this was probably somewhere around seven hundred nine
d and one theory is that this filing occurred because okay,

(20:44):
here we go again with the d D thing. The
Maso Americans were honoring a particular solar deity who is
depicted as having filed teeth. So this was a way
to show their admiration for him. Some of the skeletons
that are found in the archaeological record there show incomplete
inlays as well. Uh, and they think that this might
be because the pain was actually so much that some

(21:05):
people couldn't go through with it, or that the individual
died before it was finished. And death was also possible
fairly soon after because there was a high risk of
bacterial encephalitis after these procedures. So one of the pieces
that we read for this is a thesis paper by
a woman named Daniel Barnes, and we're gonna come back

(21:26):
and cite this a lot, but I want to insert
this here because the main argument of her thesis was that,
and I'm quoting her here, since death is a possible
outcome of intentional dental modification, it should be considered a
high risk procedure. So her point with all of this
was she sort of showcases all of the different anthropological

(21:47):
modifications of teeth and then says, you know, think about
this in context of today and how we modify her
teeth today, and that there's some danger involved there. But
she does point out that things like add and grows
and caps or modern dental procedures you know that that
that's not what she's talking about here. She's talking about
instances like trying to file your teeth down with stone,

(22:09):
or as we're going to talk about later, you know,
the extraction of all of the teeth from your lower
jaw or something like that, which even today you're going
and get your wisdom teeth removed. They put you under anesthesia.
There's always that slim possibility that you won't wake up. Yeah,
I always have that thing. So I am used to
be diagnosed with something called a mitro valve pro lapse,

(22:29):
which is one of the valves in my heart wasn't
fluttering the right way or something like that. That's why
you don't love Christmas? Yeah, exactly. So when you have
a mitro valve prolapse, whenever you go to the dentist.
You might have heard of this since your dad was
a dentist. You have to take antibiotics because they're worried
that the bacteria that they're messing around within your mouth
is going to go down and somehow infect your your

(22:51):
heart because the valve apparently makes you more susceptible to infections.
This is interesting. Uh, we'll put a pin in that
tidbit will become important later on in the podcast. Oh yeah, yeah,
of course. So okay, so we're wrapping up on the
meso American Mayans there, but they've really got this, you know,
beautiful jewelry embedded in their teeth. Uh. And then there's

(23:15):
the staining of the teeth that we want to come to.
So there's enemies staining, right, Yeah, First of all, there's
the the enemies who have already covered. And then I
believe we also have Japanese practice as well. Yeah, and
so Japanese women used to die this is a specific
culture called Yaba. I believe they used to dye their

(23:35):
teeth black with tannin powder and a ferris ascetate solution.
And they considered this again high fashion and uh it
signified marital status. It was unknown at the time, but
they also, uh you know, realized this protected their teeth
from bacterial colonization. So maybe that's what they should have

(23:55):
done to me at the dentist instead has just given
me like a solution of tannin powder or and ferres
acetate rather than you know, make me take antibiotics. This
was also done this kind of standing practice in places
like Peru, Ecuador, Vietnam, as we talked about Laos, Thailand,
the Philippines, and Africa. In Nigeria, some people stain their
teeth with something called the solen um in cannum flowers,

(24:19):
and those are apparently a relative of eggplants, or they
use something called Nicotania tobaccum, which is, as it sounds,
an herb containing nicotine that sounds like it would actually
be kind of cool. It's like it's like, what do
you call it? Um? Yep? Yeah, yeah, which of course
can also stain your teeth um. You know, we already
mentioned the enemies a couple of times, but they had

(24:42):
an interesting saying that goes along with the staining, and
that is that any dog can have white teeth, which
is it puts an interesting twist on it, right, It
goes back to that whole I am human, and in
being human, how am I different? Founderstand? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
And as I was thinking about this, because I brushed
my dog's teeth for and I was thinking about this

(25:03):
that like his obviously his canine teeth are very pronounced, right,
So I'm just trying to imagine like an anthropological dog,
like humanized dog kind of culture where they're filing down
their cane teeth. It gets back to what we talked
about on our Christmas episode. Remember in Rudolph the Red

(25:24):
Nose Reindeer, there's the whole thing with that and just
Elf and he removes all of the yet e the
bumbles teeth, the Abominable Snowman, he pulls all of his
teeth out of his head. So there's some ablation practice
going on there, oh for sure. So definitely keep Rudolf
the Red Nose Reindeer in your mind when we come
back from this break and start discussing dental extraction, mental illness,

(25:49):
and science. All right, we're back. So yeah, you're probably thinking, Okay,
so we've talked about the ways to just change the
way your teeth look. And I feel like, for the
most part, that's easier for us to get on board
with because we look, again, we've already touched on how

(26:10):
we're always altering the way our teeth appear, uh here
and in our modern Western civilization, and so we can say,
all right, I would not personally want to file my
teeth down or make them into little sharpened points, but
I can see where that lines up with our existing
view of things. But then how does it make sense? Right,
how do we get into the place where one just

(26:30):
removes the tooth or removes a bunch of teeth for
seemingly purely supernatural, superstitious or cultural reasons. Right, This isn't
like you have a bad cavity and the only way
to take care of it is the yank the tooth.
That right. In particular, there's deciduous teeth removal that's popular
in certain African tribal cultures. Uh. And it seems like

(26:52):
they purposely damage what's referred to as the tooth germ.
This is sort of like the growing tooth underneath your
baby teeth, I think, And they damn it's that so
that uh, you know, it just doesn't grow in. You
don't have a full tooth there. And in general African ablation,
it seems like it's kind of common with cultures. Uh.
And I might get some of these names wrong, but
these are the tribal cultures Amhara, Azande, Massai, new Air Bakiga,

(27:19):
a Koli, Baitarros, boogisas uh and that's in Uganda, and
then the Hia of Tanzania. And so this was one
of the fascinating things that I read about and I
think that you saw as well. And it was an
Eon magazine, right, Yeah, there's a wonderful piece in Ian
magazine by Brendan Borel. Yeah, it explores what's known as
a beano or false tooth disease in Uganda. So the

(27:44):
it's also referred to as a tooth word. Yeah, it's
I guess with a lot of things supernatural and uh
and fulkloric. It seems like it has a There are
a lot of different versions of what exactly it is.
I think, so yeah, it seems like well older versions
of this. I don't think that this is modern culture.
For them, they believed that the toothworm was a possible

(28:06):
demonic presence. That was it emerged when they saw pulp
coming out of damaged teeth. Um. So the tooth nerves
the nerves inside our teeth. Hopefully none of us have
actually seen this. I haven't. When they're exposed, they have
a kind of worm like appearance to them. Uh. And
so there's evidence that back in two d and fifty

(28:28):
b c e. Physicians would smoke tooth worms out of
the teeth by using nanbane seed that was needed into
bees wax. That doesn't sound like it would be particularly
fun either. Uh. And then the idea here is that
it would just destroy the nerves in your tooth, so
if you had any pain there that would obviously disappear.

(28:49):
I don't think you're actually getting at the quote unquote toothworm.
You're just killing the nerves in your teeth, so you
can't feel anything, right, and in this you know it can't.
We're kind of getting to the root, if you will,
of this um of this scenario, because because we're gonna
talk about some of the more you know, elaborate and
to our eyes, you know, nonsensical versions of it. But
at heart, you're dealing with somebody in an in an

(29:12):
older time, with limited resources and understanding, trying to address
physical pain, trying to deal with anomaly, denal anomalies, and
and and address them surgically. But as Brendan Barrell points out,
he just put this wonderfully in the article. Uh. He
refers to a quote sense of impotence in the face

(29:32):
of bodily mysteries. And I feel like that comes back
a time time and time again in this extraction section
of our podcast. Be here, because you have people trying
to deal with this illness, deal with this pain, deal
with this situation, and the best of their understanding seems
to point towards the removal of the problem tooth, or
the removal of a problem tooth in hopes of addressing it. Man.

(29:55):
I mean, I go back to that Tina Fake quote
that game at the beginning, like feel like, you know,
I'm closing in on forty here, and I feel like
I'm just starting to get to that point of these
bodily mysteries, you know, like it's like, wait, when where
did this like piece of flesh come from? I don't
remember this? Or why does this hurt when I wake
up in the morning. Kyle Canane has this bit about

(30:15):
how when he wakes up in the morning, his whole
body sounds like a bag of popcorn just out of
the microwave because it's all popping and everything like that.
That's and I'm I'm getting to that point too. And
you know, I'm no doctor. I don't know, so I
go into my doctor and I go, hey, what's going on.
In the same way these people probably went to their
you know, localized version of a doctor and we're like,
all right, give it to me with the nanbane seed

(30:36):
in the bees wax, because I don't know what's happening
in my mouth now, the false tooth disease, the the abino. Uh.
It also ends up, you know, applying a lot to children.
So you have you have an infant, sick, infant, infants complaining,
and so there's the belief that the child might have
this worm tooth in their head, this cursed tooth that
could result in the emergence of gum maggots. Uh. And

(30:58):
then this is going to you know, just roll out
of control, and that the causes here can range from
just you know, infected maze to outright bewitchment. In fact,
in the the magazine article, they referenced one attributed causes
just passing a false tooth on the road. Huh. So
there's a lot of superstition that gets rolled up at this,

(31:18):
and then the only way to deal with it is
you don't go to the hospital. You go to a
traditional healer for the tooth removal. Yeah. One of the
articles that we referenced for this, they referred to traditional
healers so many times that the author eventually just started
calling them thch. It took me a little while. What's
th h oh, traditional healer. Yeah. One of the papers

(31:41):
we're looking at two thousand eleven paper published in the
Journal of eth no Biology and ethno Medicine, and they
put a lot of this and some interesting context. They
said that in cameraon, for instance, traditional healers actually do
a pretty decent job at tooth extracting. And most of
the the examples they looked at, and again this was

(32:02):
in twenty eleven, you know very much, you know modern times, Uh,
most of the examples of tooth extraction stemmed from legitimate
concerns such as tooth pain, looseness of the teeth, or
or some sort of visible hole in the tooth. And
so while this paper criticized, of course a lack of
lack of standard infection control methods and proper dental anatomy

(32:23):
understanding among the traditional healers, the paper ultimately suggested, like
the answer here is not to just tell all the
traditional healers to go away, but try and bridge the
world between modern dental practices and traditional healers. Yeah, so
that they're communicating with one another and they've sort of
got a bit of understanding. I remember from that one
piece that some of the data was surprising, Like one

(32:44):
of the things they're looking at was like how often
they wore gloves when they moved between different patients and
we're like extracting teeth and then but then there was
other instances. I think they said something like three quarter
of the traditional healers if it was like a serious
dental problem, they would recommend you need to go see
an actual dentist. Like what I'm doing here isn't isn't
gonna cure your problem here. Yeah, And indeed, to come

(33:08):
back to the ugantin situation with the false tooth disease,
the Ian magazine article points out, there, you know a
number of contributing factors as to why the individual would
go to the traditional healer versus the modern hospital and
with their sick child. I would suspect that money is
one of them. Oh yeah, it's generally cheaper. We're talking
about an impoverished region where available Western medicine is still distrusted.

(33:31):
You have high mortality rates in the modern hospital's corruption, expense,
facility shortcomings. Uh, and it all results, you know, in
a modern health system that feels alien and maybe even
a bit dangerous to someone accustomed to that culturally ingrained
traditional healer system that is also just gonna it's just
gonna be so much more comfortable, and you're gonna end

(33:51):
up having more faith in its ability to cure what
ails you. And to give you an idea of the
numbers we're talking about here, So this is and day
in certain villages in Tanzania, sixty percent of people have
their teeth intentionally removed, sixteen percent in northern Uganda, in
the Sudan of Ethiopian Jews, and then seventy percent of

(34:14):
other Ethiopians do this, and then the real high point
was eight seven percent of the Messia and Kenya do this.
The Massai say that there there's a medical reason though
right there there's no longer this demonic toothworm thing um.
They're removing mandibular central incisors UH, specifically in some situations

(34:34):
so that they can help feed a person if they
end up with tetanus and subsequently get locked jaw from that.
So they want to make sure that there's a way,
you know, if their jaw is locked shut. In our societies,
we view the whole thing of the straws and everything,
or we have I V s or whatever, but you know,
in this situation they're thinking ahead. Yeah, and then there
is another thing. I read This is very brief, so

(34:55):
I don't know how much, uh, there is to this,
and I'd love to hear if somebody in our audience
knows a little more about it. But apparently the Demera
people in South Africa, they say that the reason they
remove their maxillary anterior teeth is so that they can
properly speak their language, which has a lisp to it.
Huh though. That is interesting as well and certainly something

(35:18):
that stands out from our other examples the idea of
augmenting your teeth so as to augment speech, because that's
something we didn't mention earlier. But having a full set
of teeth also plays an end your ability to to
to speak. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now another example of dental
augmentation comes to us. This was actually suggested to us

(35:39):
to us by one of our South African listeners, Sheldon. Uh.
Maybe Sheldon knows about the Demorrow thing. Yeah, yeah, maybe
she can throw in on that as well, But in
this case, she was saying she pointed out what's known
as the cape flat smile and sometimes kind of erroneously
referred to as a passion gap. So what we're talking
about here is the removal of the front teeth, the

(36:02):
front incisors amongst communities of the Western Cape in South
Africa specifically, it's something you see among poor male teenagers
that are wrapped up in gain culture. Uh. And it's
it's a modern practice. You still see it today, and
the practice seems to serve it's part of a write
a passage into adulthood. The passion gap thing. I'm not

(36:23):
gonna get into the details, but that seems to be
something where outsiders misconstrue or even decide to sort of
demonize it by saying that has some sort of a
sexual connotation. But there it doesn't seem to be anything
to back it up. Now, it's not the kind of
thing that you would go to the dentist for, or
apparently you could, but you might have to find a
dentist that would who would do this procedure. Imagine it's

(36:46):
like sort of the difference between getting like your friend
to give you a tattoo and then like going and
spending like a lot of money at a fancy tattoo parlor.
And in this case, you you spend all that money,
you take as much as you can you can actually
uh dish out, and you go get a partial dental
insert to fill that gap. And here you see just

(37:07):
you know, an explosion of gold and bling and whatever
whatever you can afford. Um, Like some of the accounts
say that, like basically, whenever you can upgrade to something
a little fancier, you do. So. So here we see
a little bit of the modern sort of bling culture.
We see some of these ancient practice we've already discussed, uh,
you know, where you're just taking gold or jewels to
brighten up the teeth, but in this case, it's about

(37:29):
let's just go ahead and remove those front four teeth
and just get something fancy and bright up in there. Yeah.
I can I mean I'm not familiar with this particular subculture,
but I can imagine like both how it would denote
status because you're showing off money in terms of like
the particular jewel or metal that you're having put in
your mouth. But then also just like hey, I'm tough

(37:50):
enough to have somebody just take these teeth out. I
don't need a gas mask, I don't need laughing gas. Yeah,
it seems it seems to be a convergence of those
two to rent forces. And you were just telling me
before the podcast episode, before we're gonna come in here
to record it, you've seen some of this in South
African hip hop, and I feel like, yeah, so, And
I might be wrong here again, like our listeners in

(38:11):
South Africa, please correct me. My only familiarity with South
African hip hop is through Diante Word, which is fairly
popular internationally. But I really enjoy them. I've seen them
tour in America and watched a bunch of their videos,
and I feel like I've seen some of this missing
front tooth action in those videos, but I don't know

(38:31):
if that's particular to this subculture. And like with people
in the background and performers and not the actual members
of the band, but people who are just performing and
dancing and stuff in the videos. All Right, we're gonna
take another quick break, and when we come back, I
know what a lot of you are thinking. You're thinking, Hey,
where we've talked about you know all these uh these
other cultures that have that have used you know, ritual

(38:52):
or unnecessary tooth extraction. Well hold on to your seats,
because when we come back from the break, we're gonna
look at examples from Canada in the good old United States. Alright,
we're back, so okay, Yeah, we had sort of set

(39:12):
this up as saying, like, well, there's a Western perception
of tooth modification that's very different from these other cultures
that we're talking about, whether it's meso American or African
or Asian. Right, and even in some cases they are
Australian tribes where they performed abbelation as well. But we've
got this going on right in Canada, right north of Maine. Yeah.

(39:37):
We we ran across this excellent paper, very intriguing paper
um titled French Canadian prenuptial dental extractions in Acadian women.
First report of a cultural tradition uh or Quebec practice. Uh.
This was yeah, this was really interesting. Uh and apparently

(39:57):
you know, it has has occurred in modern times among Acadians.
These are a descendants of seventeenth or eighteenth century French
colonists in regions of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick,
Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. And what was interesting
about this paper was the author's goal was essentially to
interview dentists in the region to find out if simply

(40:18):
if they had ever been asked to perform this procedure. Yeah,
as well as some interviews with with people who knew
or or have this procedure, just to see, like to
what extent is this a thing and not just a
matter of like anan case, there's an urban myth um
and it's and it's it's not it. It turns out
like her results were pretty positive. It turns out that
this is a thing. Yeah. In these cases, the women

(40:40):
undergo or in some cases they seek to undergo because
they talked to Dennis too said turned down right, turned down, um,
But they're seeking the extraction of all upper and or
lower uh teeth to in order to obtain dentures prior
to marry. Right. So the dentures are a dowry right

(41:00):
from one family to another, and so they have to
have their teeth removed to receive the dowry. Yeah, it's
uh you know. And again we kind of get back
to some of these cases we talked about earlier, like
at what at what point is there like a medical
concern here, and then at what point does it become
uh more complicated in terms of cultural uh you know
aesthetic values and made selection. Uh. There's at least one

(41:23):
account in the paper, and it's you know, it's a
little dubious, but I still want to mention it that
alleges that this was a British practice by which a
colonists prepared for the wilds of the New World and
its lack of dental care by simply removing one's teeth
and replacing them with dentures. That's ironic given how many
jokes are made about British dental practice and in present

(41:45):
day society. Although yeah, I don't know how much stock
I put into that. Yeah, I mean to a certain extent,
based on what we've been reading about about the the
acknowledged link between uh any of dental infection and how
that could know and and and other health problems. I
could imagine a scenario in which someone might think, or

(42:08):
might be convinced, Hey, you've got some some tooth teeth
issues going on already, you don't have the best dental health.
You're about to go to the wilds of Canada, whether
you're not gonna have a dentist. Why don't you go
ahead and get this out of the way. Why don't
we go ahead and remove the problem teeth. Maybe just
remove all those teeth, get some sort of dental um,
you know, insert and they get some get some some

(42:29):
some dentures in place, and then the only thing you
have to worry about is cleaning those things in a
stream somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's fair. Well. One of
the things that I thought was really fascinating about this
particular article was some of the dentists are at least
one of the dentist she interviewed was a Kadian was
from this culture and was like, I've never heard of

(42:50):
this before, and thought that they were joking, and then realized, oh, no,
this is an actual practice. It's just I'm removed from
this particular it's like a niche subculture within the Akadian people. Yeah,
it's a small, rare thing. But but when they poked around,
they found that, yes, it did occur with enough frequency
to suggest that it that it was an actual thing.

(43:11):
It wasn't just you know, a few individuals here and there.
So the author's core argument here is that this all
may come down to just an uncertain grasp of those
connections between oral health problems, pregnancy, and just overall health
in general. Because certainly before the advent of antibiotics, various
medical medical conditions were blamed on chronic tooth infections. So

(43:32):
if you can't figure out the source of en ailment
and you know that there's a troublesome tooth, well then
you just go ahead and yank it to be sure. Right,
So what might have begun is a half blind attempt
to ensure mother and child's survival in a harsh environment
may have become a brutal social norm. Okay. So the
next example that you have here is actually another thing

(43:54):
that we ended up talking about during that Christmas Listener
mail episode, uh, in relation to the the Abominable Snowman
having his teeth ripped out. Right, Because you're a big
fan of the TV show The Nick, Yeah, I really
love The Nick directed by Steven Soderberg. Clive Owens is
in it. Uh just a great look, fictionalized look at

(44:14):
cutting edge medicine, like the frontier of medicine and just
the ins and outs of running a hospital um in
turn of the century in New York City. And if
you're a viewer of the show, you might remember that
there's a character that pops up by the name of
Dr Henry Cotton, and he's played fabulously by John Hodgman, Like,
once you see this, you may find John Hodgmen less

(44:35):
funny in real life like that, And I mean that
is a compliment that's he does such a fine could
see Yeah, I could see Hodgemen performing like a particularly
kind of creepy uh doctor type. Yeah, and he he
but he manages the creepy in a way where it
it's the most natural Hodgman performance I've ever seen. Like,
he just does a great jobs. What's notable in the
show is that he goes around basically prescribing full dental

(44:59):
extraction for not only his mental patients, but also for
his own children. Wow, okay, okay. And this isn't because
like he's marrying them off and they need dowry dentures
or because of any particular cultural reason. Now, it seems
to be a situation where it's like those teeth are
gonna cause all sorts of horrible infections. They're just gonna
it's gonna lead to madness. Better to just pull them

(45:20):
all out now. And while fictionalized this, the writers of
the nick actually basis character on a real guy, the
real Dr Henry Cotton, who lived eighteen seventy six through
nineteen thirty three, was a respected academic psychiatrist, and he
served as superintendent of New Jersey's Trenton State Hospital. And

(45:40):
he was a huge proponent of modern medical practices. But
when he when established methods proved ineffective in the physical
treatment of mental illness, he turned to the bacteriological theory
of disease. Okay. And so this was like a general
idea at the time that was, you know, depression or
other mental illness stemmed from something going in the on

(46:04):
in the body, some Oregon problem, right in a lot
of cases like that I I had read about in
relation to this, it was the colon was being removed. Yeah, yeah,
and we'll we'll get to that, but it's yeah, but
I mean basically, this was a there was a lot
of big games going on in medicine, and we were
figuring out what the biological roots of things like cholera
and malaria were. So it seeing that the sky was

(46:26):
the limit and that we could just we we barreled down,
we could find these problems and we could just completely
take care of it. So yeah, Cotton decides to give
it a go. Uh, and in his day, there was
a prominent theory from a fair of British surgeons that
linked untreated infections in the gums and in the intestines
to your point, uh and that, and the idea was

(46:47):
that these untreated infections were toxifying the blood and this
could result in pathological brain alterations. So Cotton took this
theory ran with It's in nineteen he extracted the infected
teeth from fifty mental patients. So these are just the
infected teeth. Uh. And then he takes a step back,
but this doesn't seem to be doing any good, so

(47:07):
then he goes back in and has to just all
their teeth removed and uh. Then this doesn't work, so
he continues to chase the decay as I've heard, I've
heard the term thrown around and among dentists. Um. So
the patients have clearly swallowed painted saliva stemming from their
oral infections. So he systematically removes tonsils, spleens, stomachs, colon's,

(47:30):
the cervix, and amid all this butchery, he's reporting reporting
curate from mental illness. But have any of his patients
lived seizures? Jesus, that's the thing. Because at first everybody's like, oh,
this huge access rate, this guy's doing good work, and
he's smell pressed. Can you remove my stomach please? Yeah,

(47:52):
I mean there's obviously I can see the sort of
correlation there. There's obviously a long history of and we
talk we think about today with people who talk about
ib s between you know, the mental connection to the
digestive system. But I don't know that one necessitates the
removal of the ride. I mean, the connections are there,
it's yeah, it's just what do you do about those
connections and what kind of assumptions do you jump to?

(48:14):
Because to your point about about you know, how many
of these individuals are surviving, Uh, the mortality rate was
thirty and so when that starts to get out, the
enthusiasm for Cotton's cure here kind of you know, Peter's
out a little bit and eventually psycho now psychoanalysis gained steam.
But these procedures, particularly the surgeries and the removal of

(48:37):
you know, intestinal material. This continues at Trenton Asylum until Cotton.
Cotton dies of a heart attack in nineteen thirty three.
This actually reminds me of something that I'd like us
to do an episode about is coffee animals, because I
think that there's there's somewhat of a connection there, right that,
like the fat of coffee animals that you feel better,
you feel mentally better after you've kind of flushed your

(49:00):
stem out this way again, the connection between the digestive
system and the mental process. Oh yeah, I mean you
can get into the topic of rectal feeding, which Mary
Roach explores in her book Gulp, which I highly recommend
if you have your at all, into a bunch of
weird digestive data about how the body actually works and
some of the stuff we've done and exploring it. That's

(49:21):
a great book to Jack and my wife's read it,
and I know that it's come up on the show
frequently in the past. I need to get on that.
So we're winding down here, but it is important to
to bring things back around and touch on some of
the the the the actual science, some of what current
science is saying about the effects of tooth extraction on
brain functionality. So, according to a two thousand fourteen paper

(49:44):
from University College London published in Journal of the American
Geriatric Society, memory and walking speeds of adults who have
lost all of their teeth decline more rapidly than those
who still have some of their own teeth. Huh, that's interesting, Yeah,
it's I mean, if we'll break down here, it's a
little more problematically. I would imagine that. Yeah, I imagine

(50:06):
that there's not a direct connection between those things, but
that there's the aging process in itself is related to
those Yeah, because you have to ask questions, why why
did this individual loser teeth? You know, what the socioeconomic
situations are going on here? What, how's that factoring in?
How is pre existing mental illness factoring into lack of hygiene?

(50:27):
That sort of thing. But the study looked at over
three thousand adults age sixty or over. Uh, And then
they compared their performance in tests of memory and walking speed,
and people with none of their own teeth performed approximately
temperacent worth in both memory and walking speed tests than
people with their teeth. And they adjusted this for a

(50:48):
wide variety of factors, you know, socio demographic characteristics, existing
health problems, physical health health behaviors, did they smoke, did
they drink, do they have you know, episodes of depression
in their life? Applied all of this and they still
found a definite gap. So the theory here is that
tooth loss could be used as an early marker of

(51:08):
mental and physical decline in older age. Now, a two
thousand thirteen study, uh takes things a little, a little further. Uh.
This was published in the European Journal of Oral Sciences
and it explores sort of the hypothetical effects of tooth
loss here. The research was carried out by the by
universities in Norway and Sweden, and they looked at two

(51:29):
hundred and seventy three participants with missing teeth aged fifty
to eighty, and then they gave them memory tests and
they found that the number of teeth in an individual's
head quote positively associated with performance on episodic memory recall
as well as recognition. Okay, okay, well, I'm trying to

(51:51):
visualize maybe our listeners are doing this too. I'm trying
to visualize a biological connection between your teeth in the
memory centers and your brain. And I suppose that's part
of it. But there's also, you know, sort of the
external factors of not having your teeth and the acceleration
of memory loss. Yeah, so a lot of this seems
to come down a lot of the theory here seems

(52:12):
to come down to the fact that the movement of
our jaw and and teeth send sensory input data to
the hippocampus, the area of the brain that forms and
retrieves memories. So one hypothesis is that, so we have
reduced sensory input from those missing teeth that could be
damaging our memory. Implants could help, but they're never going
to replace all of those loss sensations. Okay, so this

(52:35):
is like a mastication type of thing that like as
you chew, your receivering sensory input. Uh okay, it's kind
of like you have all these dead phone lines and
that could be affecting the phone bank in your in
your head. To put it very simply, Yeah, I wonder well,
this is maybe unrelated, but I wonder if there's a
connection between ringing ear and and and memory loss as well,

(52:58):
because that's sort of a similar fun amenon in which,
like the dead phone line analogy is a good one
that your brains not receiving the right signals anyway, what's
what's the other high second hypothesis is that it could
come down more to chewing, so it chewing increases blood
flow flow in the brain, and it has been shown
to increase activity in numerous brain areas. Even with dentures.

(53:19):
An individual with lost teeth is going to maybe avoid
certain foods. They're gonna chew less, so there's gonna be
less chewing action and uh, and then that's gonna mean
less blood flow in portions of the brain. Possible. Yeah,
my grandmother was recently sick in the hospital and they,
I am assuming this must be like a fairly standard
practice for hospitals, but they purde everything that she ate,

(53:40):
so everything that she received was purade so that she
didn't have to chew as much because she was so
weak from the illness that she had had, which was pneumonia. Now, finally,
it's also possible that people lacking teeth uh and denture
wears that they end up avoiding certain foods, leading to
lower intakes of key vitamins, proteins, and just calories in general,
which in turn impacts brain performance. Huh. Well, I'm most

(54:04):
curious about hypothesis one, and I wonder if there's any connection.
Maybe this is just like where I'm going. But I
wrote an episode about ringing your uh for our video
series brain Stuff one time, and it's very similar kind
of kind of missing sensory signals there. So yeah, I'm
curious about that. Now. There have been other studies that
have explored correlation between dimple hygiene and various health conditions.

(54:27):
There seems to be a connection between gum health and
heart health, between gum disease and dementia. Uh, some even
suggesting that gum disease bacteria might get into the brain,
causing inflammation and brain damage. Well, that sounds very similar
to the heart thing I was talking about, earl. Yeah,
and it all comes back to, uh, you know Brendan
Burrel's quote about that that sense of impotence in the

(54:47):
face of bodily mysteries. Like, I feel like we we
end up coming back in that same place of just
being not completely sure how biological factor A influences biological
factor B. We're not as far ahead of the curve
with our own biology as we like to think that
we are. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's fair to say.
But so I guess I guess the question is, like, uh,

(55:10):
let's say, like we're in a situation where, you know,
civilized society has fallen apart and you've got a toothache.
Would you go ahead and just have somebody yank your
tooth out and then like use like a hot knife
to burn out the any tooth germ that was remaining behind.
I mean, the thing about any kind of dental pain
is you can you can imagine yourself getting to that

(55:30):
point where you say, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna
go to this traditional healer, I'm gonna go to this
guy down the street. I'm going to try something myself,
because when when stuff starts going awry in there, you're
gonna do whatever it takes. You're gonna even further connection
between you know, the mouth and the in the brain
and the mind and the I I think that there's
like a large connection there, because yeah, any kind of

(55:52):
tooth pain that I've ever had before, it's just utterly
distracting for anything else that's going on. Yeah, and certainly,
you know, any kind of dental infect and if it's
not treated, if it gets out of control, that can
have dire consequences on your overall health. So it's not
just as there's not necessarily a layer of mystery between
dental health and overall health. Yeah, So there you have it.
Dental extraction, dental modification. We've taken you through a number

(56:16):
of different cultures. We've taken you across time here and
hopefully landed in a place of curiosity, wonder, and maybe
a little horror. Yeah, so I'm curious out there. You know,
maybe you have spent time amongst some of the cultures
we're talking about, whether it's the Acadians in Canada, or
you're in Uganda or maybe meso America. You've done some

(56:37):
archaeological digs in in Mayan cultures before. What experience do
you have with this teeth modification that goes on in
other societies, or you know, what kind of experience have
you had in our own sort of Western you know,
general dentistry. Yeah, and hey, in the meantime, checks out
of stuff to blow your mind dot com that's the mothership.
That's we'll find all the blog posts, the podcast episodes

(56:59):
of the deals links out of those social media accounts
we mentioned earlier on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Hey, if
people want to get in touch with us the old
fashioned way, how can they do that? Well, they can
write us on the email and that is blow the
mind at how stuff works dot com for more on

(57:23):
this than thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works?
Dot com love,