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