H G Wells was such an excellent writer of futuristic stories because he was deeply knowledgeable about the past. His The Outline of History not only sold in the millions, but was highly regarded by everyone from Toynbee and Nehru to Einstein. So, when Wells cautioned against romanticising the past, it’s wise to listen.
In particular, Wells warned that anyone pining for ‘the good old days’ would change their mind the instant they got a toothache. P J O’Rourke also famously quipped that, “When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.” If you’re not inclined to take their word for it, then maybe read James Wynbrandt’s The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales and Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces.
Our ancestors’ teeth were in an appalling state. As Wynbrandt points out while quoting the Old Testament, calling a woman’s teeth white as sheep and noting that none were missing once counted as high praise worthy of a love poem. After all, healthy teeth were far rarer in the past than today. The first mass-produced bristle toothbrush did not appear until around 1780 in England during that country’s industrialization. Our preindustrial forebears had only a primitive understanding of what was causing their teeth to rot, fall out, and constantly ache.
Well into the High Middle Ages, it was widely believed, the world over, that toothache was caused by small worms. Consequently, all manner of bizarre concoctions were prescribed to kill the buggers. Even worse were some of the mixtures used in tooth extraction. Grinding newts or lizards into powder and applying it to the rotten tooth supposedly caused the tooth to come out painlessly. Other recipes used raven’s dung, frog fat or lizard liver.
Presumably the sufferer was too busy retching to notice the pain of the tooth extraction.
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.
Lest you scoff at pre-scientific superstitions:
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 20th century.”
The Romans, at least, were onto something.
A medical treatise written by the ancient Roman physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus and printed hundreds of years after his death in 1478 – when it was still consulted as credible medical advice – observed that toothaches “may be numbered among the worst of tortures” and recommends numbing the pain with a narcotic mixture of poppies (opium), mandrake (containing a toxin with hallucinogenic effects), cinnamon, and castoreum from the scent glands of beavers. For millennia, dentistry generally consisted of little more than attempts to numb the constant pain of toothaches and to pull out rotted teeth.
In which case, your agonised screams as your teeth were ripped from your jaws were something of a public entertainment. Itinerant tooth extractors, travelling from village to village, were as much hucksters as medical practitioners.
A trumpet blares, calling the rabble to gather before a stage in the marketplace. On a raised platform, a chattering monkey surveys the throng beneath a parasol while a juggler performs tricks and recites ribald jokes, warming up the assembly. Now the juggler retires, the music stops, and a commanding figure bolts onto the stage dressed in a magnificent plumed hat and rich tunic, a necklace of human teeth strung about his neck. Soon his boastful oration has lured a recalcitrant toothache sufferer to the stage. It is over in a moment ... the tooth-drawer holds the tooth aloft for the crowd’s delectation. Now more of the orally afflicted press forward to submit to the tooth-drawer’s ministrations. It is unlikely those lining up will have as unpainful an experience as the confederate who just pretended to have his tooth drawn. But the blare of horn and beating of drum will drown out their cries. And by the time sepsis sets in or other life-threatening complications arising from the tooth-drawer’s incompetence present themselves, the charlatan will be long gone. This is the dentist’s office of the Middle Ages.
I think I’d prefer Laurence Olivier’s sadistic Nazi dentist from Marathon Man, quite frankly.
Tooth pullers were in fact jacks-of-all-trades when it came to inflicting pain and likely fatal procedures. The 18th century English poet John Gay describes their “threefold trade”: they “shav’d, drew teeth and breath’d a vein” (that is bloodlet). Even in the 19th century, the world’s first dental journal, the American Journal of Dental Science, advised in 1839 that “local and general bloodletting” was the standard first step to treat tooth decay.
Unsurprisingly, tooth pullers garnered an unsavoury reputation as ‘liars, thieves, and quacks’. Eighteenth century London dentist Martin van Butchell “gained notoriety for displaying his deceased embalmed wife in London to attract more customers”. To “lie like a tooth-drawer” was an 18th century French proverb.
Still, what passed for ‘dental hygiene’ of the times too often meant that people felt they had no choice but to put their life in the barber-surgeons’ hands. They’d have been as safe getting Vlad the Impaler to treat their haemorrhoids.
Throughout the preindustrial age, dental practitioners of the era racked up kill ratios comparable to what a well-equipped and trained combat unit could produce. The toll of their oral ministrations usually landed dentistry firmly in death’s top 10 list of causes. London’s weekly Bill of Mortality of August 15–22, 1665, recorded 5,568 fatalities, with ‘Teeth’ holding the no. five spot on the chart. Take out the 4,237 dispatched by the plague (the no. one killer of the week), and the 111 souls who succumbed to complications from dental procedures accounted for almost 10 per cent of all deaths. Most died from ‘mortification’ – infection – that set in after botched operations or as a result of unsanitary practices.
Even should they survive, broken jaws were a common outcome of a dentist’s visit.
Dental hygiene was also the stuff of nightmares. When 17-century barber-surgeons cleaned clients’ teeth, they finished up with a tooth-whitening mixture that was a solution of nitric acid. It made teeth whiter, but also rapidly ate away enamel, hastening decay. Eighteenth century ‘father of dentistry’ Pierre Fauchard advised gargling urine and, of course, bloodletting.
The good old days? Weren’t.
