People’s teeth in past centuries were in worse shape than many realize. The first mass-produced bristle toothbrush did not exist around 1780, when England began to produce such toothbrushes, which then spread to other countries. Our ancestors had only a dim understanding of what was making their teeth rot, fall out, and constantly hurt:
A shockingly pervasive belief present in many cultures around the world was that toothaches were caused by small worms. Numerous surviving Babylonian inscriptions related to toothaches “invoke Ea, god of the abyss, and Anu, god of heaven, to smote the tooth worm.” Fighting the supposed worms infecting everyday people’s teeth was a constant battle. “By about 2250 B.C., physicians were smoking ‘worms’ out of cavities using henbane seed kneaded into beeswax. The mixture was heated on a piece of iron and the smoke directed to the cavity by a funnel.”
Centuries passed with little progress in dental techniques or understanding. A 13th-century manuscript in Old English…suggests a similar technique….
To perform a tooth extraction, the same manuscript suggests grinding newts or lizards into a powder and applying the concoction to the rotten tooth “frequently,” purportedly to cause the tooth to fall out painlessly. A 15th-century manuscript suggests essentially the same tooth extraction technique but using “raven’s dung” instead of newt powder. The physician John of Gaddesden (1280–1361), who taught at Oxford University, recommended a nearly identical method using the extracted fat of a “green frog”; in the 16th century, the Faculty of Medicine at Paris similarly recommended using “lizard liver” to calm toothaches. In 1630, Johann Stephan Strobelberger, the physician at the royal baths of Karlsbad, also recommended using the “fat of a green tree frog.”
Farther east, “Islamic physicians used arsenic to loosen teeth,” which was more effective since arsenic is extraordinarily toxic and could kill surrounding gum tissue and the nerves of teeth before extraction. However, this had the unfortunate side effect of poisoning patients, potentially causing severe health problems or even death. Dental practitioners in 15th-century Italy also advocated using arsenic to kill gum tissue, providing pain relief by rendering nerve endings nonfunctional. Arsenic was used as late as 1879, when the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Fatal poison in a tooth; what caused the horrible death of Mr. Gardiner. A man’s head nearly severed from his body by decay caused by arsenic which had been placed in one of his teeth to deaden an aching nerve,” detailing the gruesome demise of a man in Brooklyn named George Arthur Gardiner “in great agony, after two weeks of indescribable suffering.” In fact, arsenic “remained in wide use until the introduction of Novocain in the twentieth century.”
Even in the Renaissance, dentists still believed in tooth worms. The French doctor Guy de Chauliac, who came up with the term dentista (the origin of our word “dentist”), was “a proponent of the worm theory of tooth decay” and “suggested fumigation with seeds of leek, onion, and henbane mixed with goat’s tallow to drive out the worms. Bloodletting from the lips, tongue, and facial veins were other treatments he advocated.”
The worm theory was believed around the world, not just in Europe. In the 1200s, the Arab scholar Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari tried to refute the popular belief in tooth worms by revealing how they were faked by charlatans, who put real worms into the mouths of unsuspecting people with tooth aches, only to then triumphantly pull out the ordinary worms, falsely displaying them as tooth worms. Likewise, some “Chinese charlatans hid maggots in the hollow portion of extricating instruments, and pulled maggots from the mouth along with [the] extracted tooth.”
A treatise written by the ancient Roman doctor Aulus Cornelius Celsus and printed in 15th century Italy noted that toothaches “may be numbered among the worst of tortures” and recommended dulling the pain with a narcotic mixture of poppies (opium), mandrake (containing a toxin with hallucinogenic effects), cinnamon, and castoreum from beavers’ scent glands. For centuries, dentistry involved little more than trying to numb the constant pain of toothaches and to pull out rotten teeth.
