Last week I had a wisdom tooth pulled. I only mention it because the experience was a painless and quite fascinating one, and it made me think a lot about dentistry and how the profession often doesn’t get the respect it deserves from the general public.
Dentists are never fully appreciated as being the miracle workers they really are. The ability to yank out a person’s tooth without causing that person the slightest bit of pain is nothing less than amazing, so I’ve taken the liberty of compiling a little refresher course in dental history in order to give readers a renewed appreciation of dentists, who we often fear rather than appreciate.
The fact is, without modern dentists, life wouldn’t be so pleasant for us.
Dentistry has gone through the same developmental process that every other medical profession has -- moving from the realm of quackery into the world of legitimate, and fascinating, medicine.
Modern dentists owe their entire professions to generations of quacks and butchers who didn’t really have any idea what they were doing, but still yanked people’s teeth out anyway.
Dentistry is as old as history itself. Teeth dating from around 7000 to 5500 B.C. show evidence of holes from primitive dental drills. A Sumerian text from 5000 B.C. describes a “tooth worm” as the cause of dental cavities.
Dental surgery was an excruciating process back then, and there were tooth problems galore among the population in the days before Listerine and Crest. Back then, pulling out a tooth was just about the only thing a “dentist” could do for you. You’d likely get some beer or wine (or hard alcohol once distillation was invented) that would serve as a mild painkiller, and the yanking would begin.
In fact, dentistry wasn’t even considered a profession in ancient times. Many ancient dentists primarily served as barbers, so you can imagine the intense screams that would no doubt be coming from these dental offices/hair salons.
The Romans were supposedly obsessed with dental hygiene, so they invented a mouthwash that used human urine as a main ingredient. Yes, you read that correctly -- human urine. They imported urine from Portuguese people because they thought it had more strength.
Must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Urine does contain ammonia, which has cleansing properties, so they definitely were onto something. Still, most of us would now agree that pee belongs in the toilet, not in our mouths.
Fast-forward about 700 years. The first dental textbook written in English was Charles Allen’s Operator for the Teeth, published in 1685. Still, dentistry wouldn’t enter the modern age until 17th century French physician Pierre Fauchard made it the respected science we know it as today.
Fauchard’s ideas about the use of dental prosthesis, the introduction of fillings as a treatment for cavities, and about sugar being the major cause of cavities were nothing less than revolutionary.
Still, the methods of dentistry in Fauchard’s time were quite brutal. A common instrument for tooth extraction was the dental key. It resembled an actual door key. It was inserted into the patient’s mouth and would be tightened over the offending tooth. They key was then rotated to loosen the tooth. This method risked severe injury to the patient, and sometimes resulted in jaw fractures.
Mercifully, the dental key was replaced by modern forceps.
The 19th century was a huge turning point for dentistry. The first reclining dental chair was invented in 1832. The first dental school was founded in Baltimore in 1840. The era of modern local anesthetics began in 1905 when novocaine was first marketed. Its successor, lidocaine, is used by dentists to this day. The effect of fluoride on dental health was discovered in the 1930s. The first fluoride toothpastes were made available in the 1950s.
And the improvements still continue today. Recently, lasers were approved to treat dental decay.
No one enjoys going to the dentist, but these days, the vast majority of the discomfort we experience from it is emotional. We worry and stress about the visit for days, if not weeks, beforehand. But most will agree that the actual experience isn’t nearly as bad as worrying about it, and going to the dentist can actually be fun as we gaze around the room at all the different devices and tools that are now used.
It’s great to know we don’t have to go through the intense pain people did in centuries past when they needed some work done on their teeth. Still, those so-called quacks who thought worms caused cavities and subjected people to urine-based mouthwash deserve recognition, too.
Every medical practice starts somewhere, and without those first generations of dental practitioners who did their best with what the science of the day taught them, we wouldn’t have the painless dental techniques we take for granted today.
Thank you, dentists, for making the world a much less painful place.
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