The Twisted History of Dentistry

If you think going to the dentist now is not fun, just wait until you hear about what they did in the Middle Ages. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm joh
caught and then fun of me this. I'm sorry I
had something in my mouth. It is stuff you should know,

(00:22):
and I have no room to make fun of you. Friend.
I've been on my own dental journey for some time
now and I'm still in the midst of it. What
are you got going on? All sorts of stuff I
was not granted with, like great strong, um, indestructible, like
teeth and all that, you know, like the feeling I
thought like I just hadn't taken enough care of him whatever.

(00:44):
But now that I actually do take really good care
of my teeth, I found like, no, it's they're just
not as great as they could be. I think, Yeah,
I'm I'm fully aware with that emotion, as you know.
And you know, I don't even know if I said
a may set on the air, but my front went,
I'm gonna have to have it redone. Yeah, yeah, when
is that going to happen? It's sort of I mean,
right now, he's basically like, it's not causing any trouble

(01:06):
right now, but it's gonna happen at some point, so
he almost made it sound like, whenever you feel like
you're up for being toothless again for three months, let
me know just time, just in time for our next
live show whenever that is. Oh jeez, I forgot about that. Um,
I don't know, we'll see. Yeah, well, it's not like

(01:27):
you haven't been on stage without a tooth before. You're
taking them out like that was your stick at at
the beginning of a number of shows. So don't get
shy these days, Chuck. No, you gotta you gotta work
your deficiencies. That's true. So we're talking about the history
of dynastry, which, by the way, people listening, I know
you know this probably, but it wasn't until like late

(01:49):
in the eighteenth century that that word was even used. Really,
they didn't even call it dynastry until then. They called
it fizzle stick. And we should thank quite a few
people here. I'm sure you have some uh websites that
you looked at, but I went to the British Dental
Association art took dot org History Daily, Uh, this great

(02:09):
website called all Things Georgian. I think it's a blog
where you can find some cool old pictures of antiquated
dentistry tools. Uh, and then a book by James Wybrandt
called The Excruciating History of Dentistry insert colon sound. Has
that been happening, by the way, I don't think so.
I think Jerry thought we were joking about that. Literally,

(02:31):
I've just been saying that. I'm pretty sure, well I
haven't picked it up on any of the QA I've
been doing. I haven't either, So we'll find out. I'll
pay extra attention UM to some tales and oral oddities
from Babylon two braces. Very nice. Yeah, huge, huge shout
out also to our boy Dave Ruse for helping us
with this one as well. Yeah, this was my idea,

(02:54):
and as when we instructed Dave, I said, Hey, Dave,
how about history of dentistry? And it's like, I don't
want to talk about any thing modern that works. I
want to talk about all the old stuff, right, and
all the stuff that they tried along the way that
people screamed and excruciating pain. And actually that's I think
that's that's good for UM for pointing out, Chuck that
there are points where what stuff we're talking about like

(03:16):
might actually make you feel faint, like it happened to me. Yeah,
there's a trigger warning for sure. There was this one
site called Science Museum Group Collection Cumbersome, but they have
a lot of um dental old dental stuff in their collection,
and they have very high rise pictures and a lot
of them have descriptions of how the thing was used,

(03:37):
and like, I like, i'd like break out in a
little trickle sweat along the top of my lip and
like get a little woozy just reading about this stuff.
And I'm pretty tough with that kind of thing. I mean,
I can talk about poop all the live long day,
but when it comes to like pulling teeth out without
anesthetics and things like that, it's my knees get a
little wobbly. Yeah. And I don't know if you had

(04:00):
the same reaction, but looking at these ol dental tools,
it's it's like, well that was clearly also this you know,
like some sort of ironsmithing tool or whatever. And they
just said, well, hey, I bet you if you move
that little spont dibbot over here, you could also use
it to crank out a molar. And as we'll see,

(04:20):
if you wanted a tooth remove for a very long time,
depending on where you lived, you probably went to go
see your local smithie. Yeah, crazy stuff just settle in everybody.
Let's start at the very very beginning, because for at
least seven thousand years people have been talking and writing
about toothaches. The Babylonians, I believe, we're among the first

(04:42):
to ever create an alphabet, to ever write anything down.
And one of the things they wrote about was toothaches
and the idea of where toothaches came from, which are
called toothworms chuck, which are cute sounding. Actually you know, yeah,
the toothworm is what you I think it is, even
though it's not real, but little tiny worms that get

(05:03):
in your mouth, and sometimes that they would originate in
your mouth like spontaneously. Sometimes they got into your mouth
somehow and worm their way literally into your tooth like
the the non existent core of an apple. And uh,
this is you know. They said, all right, here's what
you should do. You should you should uh do some

(05:25):
sort of ceremony to the gods and ask for a
little help from the gods. And then later on they said, oh,
maybe we can actually try something. And that early something
and this is two to five zero BC years ago
for most people would say, Uh, they would heat up
a piece of um. They would heat up bees wax

(05:48):
filled with hinbane seeds and put it in your mouth,
and so it basically fills your mouth up with the
smoke of the hinbane seed, which is a nightshade and
it can be really dangerous if there's a lot of it.
But this guy, I just showed you where they were at.
It seems like all the earliest and for a long
time mitigation efforts were trying anything to just numb the

(06:09):
pain a little bit for a while, because hem pain
will do that in small doses, I'm sure. And it
was basically like, let me stop the pain for a
little while, but the pain would always come back, so
eventually they had to move to extraction. Yes, and that
those toothworm The toothworm theory of teeth pain had some
really like um staying effect, like it was around in

(06:30):
the medieval medieval times in Europe. Uh, if you actually
go to medieval times today in your local suburb, you'll
hear them talk about toothworms. And there was this No,
I don't think so unless somebody really did their homework.
But it wouldn't surprise me. No, Um, there was a
study I ran across that talked about and this was

(06:52):
a paper from talked about a Chinese traditional medicine practitioner
who cited toothworms as the cause of somebody's tooth that
they were healing and they used that same beeswax, henbane,
he um like medicine to treat it. Here's what I
want to know. Did they actually see any worms ever? Like,

(07:14):
was this somebody whose mouth was so infected they got
worms or something? Oh boy, wouldn't that be something. I mean,
I don't know if they were completely invisible. It just
seems a little weird. Maybe they saw pus and and
it came out as in kind of a worm like form,
like is it from the gums and somebody thought it
was worms or who knows, maybe somebody did have worms.
It seems weird to just be like it's worms without

(07:35):
anyone ever having seen worms of any kind. I told
you guys, I didn't know that you're talking about mouth
bus Uh. Let's skip forward to ancient Egypt where we
have who maybe the first dentist, and this is around
b C or to six zero zero during the time

(07:56):
of king Is that dozer? That's what That's how I'd
say j is silent, right, uh de hooser a dohoeser. Uh.
There was a scribe called Hessy Ree who and they
read the hieroglyphics on the scribes burial chamber that basically said,

(08:18):
this guy is the best in town dentistry. He was
the greatest of those who deal with teeth, uh, and
of the physicians. And that was I think one of
the first sort of mentions of someone you know, written
down on uh, well not paper, but hieroglyphics written down
that someone actually did this for a living. Yeah. The
paper actually did come not too much longer after that. Um.

(08:40):
The Papyrus Ebers, which we've talked about many times, it's
a scroll, and it had a lot of stuff medical
ailments and treatments for those ailments, and there were treatments
for toothaches and um other kinds of like oral problems
like bleeding gums and stuff like that. And of course,
because what they had a hand at the time where

(09:02):
like medicinal cures, they prescribed all sorts of medicinal cures.
And it's like you said, there was basically just this
aim to cure the pain um, and they would do
all sorts of things like use opium, or they would
use that henbane or other kinds of night shade. But
then also, um, problematically, they would use arsenic, which um

(09:25):
is it really does kill disease tissue, sure, but it
also can kill you two in some pretty horrific ways. Um.
What's crazy about that is not that the ancient Egyptians
were using that, you know, like thirty years ago, but
that that was still in use into the modern age,
Like people were using arsenic for a very long time

(09:46):
to treat mouth stuff. Um. And in fact, we've done
a lot of weird stuff to our mouth and use
a lot of things we shouldn't have been using in
our mouths over the years. I was trying to think
of a bleeding gums Murphy joke there a minute ago.
But all you have to do is say his name
and then I guess, uh you you mentioned ancient Chinese
medicine or a traditional Chinese medicine, and they were kind

(10:10):
of on board early on. It's funny because sometimes people
seem to be going toward the right thing because they
were using things like rinses and mouth washes. Makes sense
they would also use enemas. I'm not sure about that.
Enemas have been listed to cure a whole host of things,
but I think I don't know about toothaches. It was

(10:30):
more for the distraction, is my guess, right, than someone
punches you in the mouth. But acupuncture. Of the three
acupuncture sites for TCM, twenty six of them are tied
to toothache relief. UM. And then piling on from the
different cultures that added and contributed to like our general

(10:52):
human knowledge of how to treat problems with the mouth. Um.
The Hindus from say like India and Southeast Asia and
South Asia. UM. They put their stuff down in the Vedas,
which were a bunch of ancient texts much like the
Papyrus Ebers, which dealt with things like medical conditions, including um,

(11:13):
how did not just treat tooth problems in teeth pain
but also how to like prevent it. And they actually
prescribed using like a twig with the end with the
end fraid to um to basically chew on and also
just kind of brush with it was like the first
earliest toothbrush. And they also had dentrifices, which is a

(11:34):
type something you would use to clean or polish or
scrape off your teeth. Um made of honey oil and herbs,
which is pretty great. Like that was pretty groundbreaking, frankly. Yeah,
and that's people still use, uh, I mean in survival
handbooks and stuff. They say, if you're you know, lost

(11:57):
in the woods for for many many days, you're gonna
want to take care of your teeth. It sounds silly,
but if you're wandering around for three weeks, uh, you
want to just feel fresh. But but the whole twig
fraid twig thing is what they still people still do
that in different cultures around the world, chewing on twigs.
You can even buy some of that stuff still uh

(12:19):
here in the West, and uh like dental twigs to
chew on and stuff. Yeah, And if you ever have
closely watched Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow uses one in
that movie that she really she does. I saw it.
I don't know if I closely watched it, though, Well,
you need to go back and closely watch it. That
thing is full of so many um like, so much imagery,

(12:41):
so much illuminatut stuff. It's crazy. Really, did you watch
it recently? No? For some reason, her chewing on that
twig made an enormous impression on me because I haven't
seen that movie since the nineties, but I've never forgotten that,
And it's not like one of those things where you know,
like I only think of it when I'm confronted with

(13:01):
Shakespeare and love, like it just pops into my head
every once in a while, weirdly, so I was primed
for this episode, Chuck. So when you think when I
say the words Gwyneth Paltrow, I know you think of
two things in this order. Her duet with Huey Lewis
that's third cruising? Did you just do that to me?

(13:22):
Chewing on twigs? What's what's the third one? Just goop
in general? Okay, that's probably just goop. Second, so chewing
on the twig goop. And then yes, that duet that
I can sometimes push out of my head until you
bring it up. Um. So, now we move on to
ancient Rome, which is where you know, things sort of

(13:44):
took a leap forward in a way, like a lot
of stuff did in ancient Rome, not to the kind
of modern dental work that we're you know, used to
today obviously, but for the time not too bad, and
that they did things like crowns, they did bridge work, Uh,
had dental prosthetics made from things like ivory or bone,
which makes sense. Uh, so they kind of advanced things

(14:07):
a little bit. There was a huge bit, if you
ask me, yeahs enormous leap forward. Yeah, but I mean
I don't I'm sure they look pretty jankie. You know. Well,
you could still chew a turkey leg, and by god,
you'd be grateful you could. Probably it didn't matter what
you looked like in ancient room. Everybody too wasted on wine.
Oh I missed my time and place, didn't I you

(14:28):
really did. Uh. There was a position, their name all
less Cornelius Celsus, who filled supposedly filled the first cavities,
but they weren't traditionally like we think of cavities. They
were from poard lead, and they were meant to serve
as something to grab onto to actually pull a tooth.

(14:49):
So I guess he would do it to like some
sort of a post or a stem or something. I
think he would poor. Yeah, it's weird because you would
have to use molten lead, and you can't just go
around pouring that on people's teeth and expecting their face
to not fall off or develop a nice post. So
so yeah, I'm not. I'm not. I get the impression

(15:09):
that he molded it around whatever tooth was left so
that he had more gripping power on That was my
take on it. But but it did end up becoming like, um,
I guess at the very least, it's noteworthy that he
he kind of came up with the dental fillings, even
if that wasn't the point of it. Uh. And then

(15:31):
before I guess we break, we should mention this one
more kind of fun fact. An ancient room for a
for a mouth wash, they recommended rinsing the mouth with
the first yurin of the morning, which everyone knows is
the densest yellowest urine protein rich. So we are going

(15:52):
to break now because I have that taste in my
mouth thanks to you, urine. Yeah, I'm very very um suggestible.
Have you ever drank your in? No, No, I can
say that I never have. I think most people can
say one way or the other. Right, Yeah, well, yeah,
that's a yes or no question. Yeah, yeah, I'm sort

(16:14):
of a little bit. I haven't either. I was just
I was just wondering, you never know. Yeah, well, it's
good that after thirteen years we're still exploring one another.
All right, well, let's take a break and we'll be
back right after this. So Chuck, we're back, and we're

(16:48):
into the Middle Ages. Now. I don't know if anyone's
caught onto this, but we're loosely organizing this. Um yeah,
over the over the years, okay, and we've reached the
Middle Age Middle Ages of Europe, I should say specifically,
um and after Rome fell in so many ways. And
of course we've talked about it before, but the Middle

(17:10):
Ages are often called the Dark Ages. You're not even
supposed to call them the Middle Ages because it makes
the stuff that happened during this time inconsequential and it's
just not the case. But it is true that, like
the practice of dentistry really took a nose dive during
this time. So this is actually a pretty good example
of how human knowledge in um, well, the human knowledge

(17:32):
of how to do things smartly really fell off for
a little while had to be rediscovered, that's right. And
it was around this time that physicians like they were
something special back then. But the physician said, I'm not
messing around with teeth, like the mouth is beneath me.
Which is funny that that's still sort of a thing, right, Yeah,

(17:52):
it's true as far as like, uh, what movie was
that the The Hangover when Ed Helms was a dentist
and none of the doctors like them any respect, wasn't it? Um?
Wasn't it on Seinfeld that George pretended to be a
dentist for a little while? Was it? He pretended to
be an architect? Right? But there was something about a
dentist there. It was going to be like a dentist

(18:14):
at first. Maybe I don't know. Well there was the
dentist too, which was what's his face? Kranston, Tim Whatley,
Tim Whatley, I don't know. It's I don't know. Okay,
well there's something to pretend to be a dentist. Maybe
the kid double cross the kid that George was sponsoring
for the the Susan's Foundation was said he wanted to

(18:37):
be an architect, and then when he takes him in
there for the scholarship, he changes, he double crosses him
and says he wants to be a dentist, and everybody
laughed about how stupid architects are, even though Georgia an architect.
I think we may have hammered it out here live
on the episode. So if physicians did not pull teeth.
That was left to a couple of other people professions.

(19:01):
One was called a tooth drawer, uh, not a tooth drawer.
And the first reference I found that this was Peter
of London in thirteen twenty. Okay, you're a better researcher
than I am. That's not true, but it is Chuck,
at least in this case, it is very true because
I tried. I looked high and low and did not
turn that up to find them. Two drawers drawers from

(19:22):
the Middle Ages. Well, I think they started in the
thirteen hundreds, but I do think you're right in that
they had their sort of apex probably in like the
seventeen and eighteen hundreds, because and we'll explain what they are.
They are exactly the character that uh what's his face
played in Christoph Waltz in Django unchained. Yes, when he

(19:46):
played the dentist, he now he would have been he
was kind of like a tooth drawer. No, he definitely was.
He was. He was an itinerant dentist for sure. Um
And yes, he he was like a more tooth drawer
than what you would consider a dentist in today's standards.
But I also have the impression that tooth drawers were
way more like showman like, um, much less scrupulous and

(20:10):
and like refined, and they were just kind of like
well like Charlotte Charlottean's and actually the word Charlatan is
the Italian for tooth drawer. Yeah, I thought that that's
who that character was, though we just didn't get to
see him practice that much. I see, I see, okay,
because he wasn't doing dentistry in the movie, but he
rolled through with that you know, big old tooth on

(20:33):
the spring of his buggy, which is pretty fun. But
I'm sure at the very least Tarantino, you know, sort
of based it on this practice, which was they would
come into town. They were sort of part entertainer, part um,
not even part dentist, because what they really were were
just people with enough uh verve to take pliers and

(20:56):
yanka tooth out of somebody's mouth. Yeah, and they on
a stage, yes, on a stage, and they would be
surrounded by a band maybe depending on um, you know
what errow we're talking about, they would uh might they
might have jugglers and acrobats like they basically like surrounded
themselves with a circus and the main attraction, the main

(21:18):
event was the pulling of teeth, and it would just
be like one after the other, come on up here.
And that was a lot of times your only option,
depending on where you lived, was to wait around for
the tooth drawer to come along and hopefully pull your teeth,
or again, like we talked about before, you might have
somebody in town who was a blacksmith or a goldsmith

(21:41):
um who would be willing to pull teeth and maybe
even made like some sort of primitive dental appliances to
to replace the pulled tooth what with, So you would
go see him, they pull the tooth and then they
put like a I don't know, an iron tooth in
in its place or something like that. But that was
your options for a very long time. Yeah, and I
think the tooth drawer that you know, the purpose of

(22:01):
the band was to distract people from the pain, the
howling pain. So the band would they would literally tap
on the stage louder for the band to play louder
when it got more intense, and they would, you know,
they would dope them up with like liquor or something,
and part of it was to like pull teeth but
not like, hey, I want to pull fifty teeth in
this sound to make money. I think it was like

(22:22):
fifty cents of tooth. It was mainly, I think, to
sell the tonics and the salves and all that snake
oil stuff that came along with it as well. Yeah
that's where they get you. That's totally where they get you.
Still where they get you. Yeah, so so okay, So
tooth drawers were medieval, but that's really impressive that they
lasted until the eighteenth century. They were They were around

(22:44):
for a really long time. One of the problems was
that not only were they Charlatan's like one of their techniques.
When they came into town, the first person they would
call on was like a plant who was working with
them and would come up with like a tooth in
their mouth already, and the dentists would pretend to just
painlessly pull it, and they'd spit this tooth out and
there you go. And then all of a sudden, everybody

(23:05):
who actually did have tooth paint would be willing to
come up on stage. They were hucksters. There were from
what I saw, actual like legit ones who cared about
people and wanted to ease suffering that Christoph Waltz is
of the tooth drars, but there were plenty. For the
most part, they were generally viewed as carneys, like you
didn't you didn't you know, you didn't like talk openly

(23:27):
about how much money you had in your wallet around
him kind of thing. Right, Um, And you know, at
the beginning of this section we mentioned that there were
a couple of types of people would do it because
physicians wouldn't. The tooth roar was one, and then the
barber surgeon was the other. If you've ever seen the
great Saturday Night Live skit from years ago with Steve
Martin as Theodoric of York, one of the great all

(23:51):
time skits, I don't think i've seen that one. He
was a barber and as you know, of course, everything
that comes in there, and he's like, you just need
a good bleeding, Like Bill Murray came men with both
of his legs broken off and just blood everywhere, and
he's like, you need a bleeding. He's like, I'm already bleeding. Uh.
It's good stuff. But um. Barbering was first introduced in

(24:11):
Rome and about two nineties six, and they think that
they got into dentistry some because they already had the tools,
like sharp things basically. Uh. And eventually they would split.
Barber surgeons would split up in seventy. But before that
they were literally barbers and surgeons. They would cut hair
and stuff and also cut you open if they needed to. Yeah.

(24:35):
But when they split off, it's not like the barber
surgeons stopped cutting you open. They would still do limb amputations.
They would do bleedings like blood lighting with leeches. They
would do um, tooth pulling, um. And they would also
shave you and give you a haircut. It was like
the other stuff that the medical surgeons who went to

(24:55):
the universities, the earlier universities for training, um, that's what
they kind of kept as their own. They became the
physicians where the barber surgeons were, you know, doing like
stuff anybody could do, you know, like amputating a limb. Right,
And the theodoric of York Bit is appropriate here because
that's sort of what you know, the whole blood letting

(25:16):
and bleeding thing was they were. They would bleed people
for all kinds of things, including tooth pain. Um. They
would say, you know, I think all the way up
until like the first half of the eight hundreds. If
you had a cavity or something, they would bleed you first,
like first thing. It was just a matter of course. Yeah,
And Dave turned up UM. As late as nineteen seventeen,

(25:39):
a guy named Charles Edmund Kells, who was respected for
dentistry UM wrote a treatise on how to um put
how to direct leeches to a specific spot on the gums,
to that part of the gums. And I looked into
my great astonishment, Chuck, we have not done an episode
on leeches, and by god, we are going to do

(25:59):
an episode. Really. I know. We didn't want to medical leeches, right,
we did a bizarre medical treatments episode and that was
in there, and it was in there, but I mean
it's perfect. It's like weird medical stuff animal episode. It's
got it all. It's yeah to the movie leeches. Gotta
talk about stand by me? Oh yeah, yeah, that movie,

(26:22):
but also leeches too. Was there a movie called Leeches?
I'm sure there was. And I think I had an
exclamation exclamation point. Well, I'll tell you what. If there's
not that movie, we'll do that movie too, Okay, like
we'll make it ourselves. Yeah, starring us, written directed by us.
The whole deal. This sounds awesome. We could we could
just go back and use our This Day in History
series and just dub in new dialogue and call it

(26:44):
as right. Um. So the tools that they would use,
this is where I went to that Georgian All Things
Georgian website. There were all kinds of things. It was
something called a dental pelican. All these were sort of
versions of forceps. At the end of the day. Uh,
the pelican looks I was sort of like ice tongs,
like for big blocks of ice. I couldn't make heads

(27:06):
or tails of how it used. I don't know. I
mean there's something called a dental key, which um could
be used to either lever out your tooth or just
break it into pieces. That was the one that made
me feel first faint. So George the Third's operator for
the teeth, Thomas Bird Moore, uh wrote some stuff in

(27:26):
his Tristas on the disorders and Deformities of the teeth
and gums in seventeen seventy and he talked about this
lady that came in that had, you know, had a
bad tooth that needed to be pulled. One of our
upper molars and he said that after some work, he
brought away the affected tooth together with a piece of
jawbone as big as a walnut and three neighboring molars. Lord. Yeah,

(27:46):
so that was I'm glad you said that. I ran
into that all over the place. One of the problems
with pre trained dentistry, um, where there was like actual
like science based treatments and stuff like that when you
had your tooth pulled, like there was a really good
chance that a chunk of the bone and like your

(28:09):
your jaw was going to come out along with it
because they didn't know what they were doing, and um,
like do you could die from it? Like a lot
of people actually died from an infection that was brought
on by a badly pulled tooth, a botched tooth tooth drawing. Yeah,
this is um. I mean, it's sad, but it's kind
of funny too because it was so long ago. But
the Bill of mortality in London in sixteen, Uh what

(28:33):
the number five cause of death on the bill of mortality?
It was just teeth, That's all you need to say.
That's it. They were apparently a hundred and eleven people
in London died from infections in one week, um, brought
on by botch dental dental pullings. Again, we don't mean
to be laughing, but uh, comedy is tragedy perfect plus time. Right. Yeah,

(28:57):
I know exactly what you mean. I've got one that's
coming up that I just can't help. Okay, So we
finally have reached that eighteenth century where that's interestingly, that's
the heyday of the tooth drawers that we described, like
where they roll into town with like a circus around
him and everything. The early eighteenth century was when they

(29:18):
were really doing that up. Um. But at the same time,
this is also the origin of dentistry as we understand
it today, like modern dentistry. And there are two guys
that are typically pointed to as the um the fathers
of dentistry. One is a Frenchman named Pierre Fauchard, Yeah,
and the other is that an American named green Vardamin Black,

(29:42):
which is a pretty cool name. G BB. Yeah, two
colors in your name, that is impressive. You don't see
that very often. Like his name is Green Black, Yeah,
I never thought about that. Well, you just heard his
name recently. You know what you get when you mixed
green and black, like black I think black, right, Yeah,

(30:03):
so you could just call him black. So Pierre Fourchard
he uh. He pioneered a lot of things. But one
of the funny things that you never really think about
as far as an advancement was literally just putting people
in an armchair to work on them. Apparently before then
they would lay people on the floor and I guess
get on their knees. The dentist would and put their

(30:25):
head between their knees and like hold it between their
knees and thighs to keep it steady because it was
such an awful thing. Yes, I mean that that was dentistry. Yeah,
so it really was like cutting edge to be like,
how about you just make yourself comfortable in this chair
and I'll stand under you instead and me comfortable, right. Um.
And that wasn't the extent of Fouchard's contributions. He was

(30:46):
the first to to create like evidence based treatments. Um,
he didn't. He just kind of pooh pooed the idea
of just following tradition. He felt tradition was probably not
so great and he wanted to do a apply science
and and um ration rationalism, I guess to the to
the whole pursuit of treating people's teeth problems. Um. He

(31:08):
also got really good at um creating um like prosthetics
like dentures and things like that that he would string together. Um.
He also was um known for introducing a lot of
the dental tools. I don't know if he invented all
of them, but he he organized and categorized him and
basically his treatise, I think it was a two volume

(31:31):
work that spanned eight hundred pages, basically set down like
here's how you be like a legitimate dentist, seventeen fifties style.
And a lot of his his observations were so um
they were just accurate that they still hold hold true today.
Although I've seen his his work as being described as primitive,
but he was. That's what pioneers do, They produced accurate

(31:55):
primitive work. What about green Black? Was he basically in
the same out. I didn't see a lot about him.
I didn't do a lot of research on green Black.
I just saw that both of them tend to be
tied together as they kind of split that um that
that name is the father. Yeah. I saw much more

(32:15):
on Fochard. Uh should we take a break now, all right?
We'll take a break and we'll talk about anesthetics and toothbrushes, toothpaste,
all that good stuff right after this. So, now, Chuck,

(32:49):
we finally reached the point where dentistry doesn't have to
be the worst thing that ever happened to you in
your entire life? Then why is it the worst thing
that happens to me? Be as you're failing to imagine
how bad it could be? All right, I got you. Well,
like we should thank our lucky stars that we were
born into an era where there's such a thing as
an anesthetics. Yeah, I mean they did their best back

(33:12):
in the day. Like we mentioned earlier, they were using plants,
they're using night shades, they're using opium, hashish, uh, kind
of whatever they could get their hands on to make
people feel a little better while you're doing this horrific
stuff party at the dentist's office. That's right, Uh, you
would use That's still the best part of when I
get my implants. You know that like twelve seconds of

(33:33):
bliss of what do you get? Do they give you
nitrous twilight sleep? Okay, wow, that's good stuff. Huh And
with that huh, yeah, you get the I V and
about eight seconds of you know, the best part of
your week, and then you wake up in your mouth
is a little sore, like when you're when you're counting backwards.
You're like, oh man, they know I'm totally wasted. I know,

(33:57):
and they're making fun of me. Uh so sleep Sponges
was another thing they used. They would soak sponges in
him luck again, opium, man drake whatever they had, and
then dry it out in the sun and then it
was just kind of there at your disposal, and when
you wanted to use it, you would just activate it
by dipping it in some water, put under their nostrils

(34:17):
and there you go, goodbye, good night. Um. I also
didn't know this, and apparently a lot of people don't,
because I saw it mentioned here there, but nobody seemed
to have much detail about it. But ether Um, which
I squarely placed in the nineteenth century, as far as
anti sex go, was usually known to humans from the

(34:38):
twelve hundreds. I didn't know that. Yeah, there was an
alchemist named Raymond Lollis or Raman Lowly. He was Spanish,
but he was an alchemist, and he somehow stumbled onto
ether I could not get the details, but he saw that, like, oh,
this is really good at painkilling. He called it sweet vitriol.
But um, apparently it was just lost. The knowledge was

(34:59):
lost to Stree for about five six years, which is
that's an example of why the Middle Ages or that
shouldn't be called the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages,
like that was a discovery. It's just that at the
time everybody was too stupid to spread that information. I guess, right. Uh.
And then finally in the seventeen seventies we come upon

(35:21):
one of the greatest discoveries, nitrous oxide, which is so
great we did a whole episode on it, so we
don't really need to go over all of this again.
But one of the things I don't even know if
we mentioned back then, because I feel like I would
have remembered this. But one of the young scientists early
on who was practicing with it, named Humphrey Davy, uh,

(35:42):
would put it in a sack to huff and he
called them paradise bags. What a great name. I think
I remember saying that. Well, there were you know, the
long and short of nitris is it sort of came
and went over the years with various successful demonstrations in
front of groups of doctors in Dennis, so I'm not

(36:02):
so successful in front of big groups, and so it
kind of ebbed and flowed in popularity as a result. Yeah,
Horace Wells um famously botched the demonstration that set um
nitrous oxide back a good twenty years basically, but a
couple of years after that, one of his students, UM W. T. G. Morton, said, Hey, everybody,

(36:23):
you thought nitrous oxide was something, check out ether And
he introduced ether um through a demonstration and showed how
somebody could have a tumor removed without even batting an eyelash,
and everybody was like, Okay, this ether is pretty good.
So either ether sotoaked rags were a UM for a
very long time and anesthetic used in surgery but also

(36:46):
dentistry too. And then laughing gas kind of UM came
back about like twenty years after wells is botched demonstration.
So by the late nineteenth century, the mid late nineteenth century,
UM we had two very powerful anesthetics that just completely
changed the course of dentistry and I think allowed people

(37:08):
to start being like, Okay, I'll I'm willing to start
like actually going to see a dentist now if they've
got this stuff to offer, right, and so they said,
you know it would be even better is if we
gave them cocaine. Uh. And there was a dentist, an
American named William Stewart Halstead, who was the first person.
I guess you know, they noticed, hey, when we're when

(37:31):
we're taking this stuff and we put it in our mouth,
it makes our mouth numb. So maybe we can use
it for dentistry. Right, and so somebody this in the bathroom,
that's right, and they're like, oh god, this's got such
a bore. Uh, they injected He was the first one
to inject it into the patient's gum and jaw for
pain relief. And so that, you know, following that forward,
there were a lot of cocaine based toothache remedies. Obviously, Um,

(37:56):
you know, cocaine had the dark side, so uh, they
placed it with new cocaine or no vocane and some
other you know, non addictive pain relievers. But for a
while there, cocaine was certainly used in dentistry. Yeah. Apparently
Halsted said that he lost three assistance to cocaine addiction.
And Dave puts like they actually died and I was

(38:19):
just thinking, like I can just imagine Halstead like hearing
like a thump in the other room and just being
like another one. Can you just imagine like losing three
of your assistance to overdose deaths from cocaine, shooting up
cocaine and and like you're just trying to do your
dentistry practice. And then he threw him in his convertible
and drove him over to Eric Stoltz's house, right, and

(38:43):
it all worked out. Man. We got pop culture flying
all over the place today too. Uh So, now we're
at toothbrushes and toothpaste sort of a little more in
earnest in that they you know, we kind of talked
about the ancient stuff that they would use these tree
um uh wigs and stuff like that. Gwyneth Paltrow, Yeah,
Gwyneth Paltrow. Um, they they would use cloth. I think

(39:06):
the Queen of England use cloth and toothpicks until the
mid nineteenth century. Basically any kind of um manufacturing process
kind of didn't make it affordable to even make regular toothbrushes,
so it's cloth and sponge and rinses and stuff like that.
But I think they eventually worked out the toothbrush and
they needed something to put on the toothbrush, at which

(39:29):
point they said, how about just some really strong uh
scrubbing what's the word I'm looking for? Bubbles? No, like,
what's the power? Like an abrace of powder, and they
use stuff like crushed coral and pumice, but that would
ruin your teeth after a few weeks really quickly, and
so um toothpaste came along, and it's still followed that

(39:52):
same pattern where apparently the earliest incarnations of pepsodent had
um something that was it was an abrasive that you
could actually cut glass with. And there was another one,
another toothpaste called tartar Off, that had hydrochloric acid in it.
Tartar Off for sure, I mean it would make your
teeth white, for sure, but then it would eventually wear

(40:14):
them down to nubs in like a few months. You know. Yeah,
I think it took a while to kind of um
find the right balance between protecting the teeth and cleaning
the teeth at the same time. Yeah, And I mean
there's still abrasives in your toothpaste today. They've just gotten
a lot better at getting it just the right amount
so that, yeah, it doesn't wear your enamel down baking
soda and stuff like that, right, yeah, And I ran

(40:35):
across something and I think the A d A website.
Um that in America, toothpaste and brushing your teeth in
general did not become widespread. It wasn't like the norm
until after World War Two. And it was because American
g i's returned from Europe saying, hey, it's crazy. Everybody

(40:55):
over in Europe has like actually like nice breath and
this is how they do it. And that's when it
really took off from what I and yeah, very cool,
Yeah it is. It is cool in a way, but
also like wow in another way, like these are my
grandparents were talking about. Right, Uh, the greatest generation, that's right,
the greatest generation. Uh. We can dispel the myth that

(41:18):
George Washington had wooden teeth. Uh, he had terrible teeth
and he had a really bad time with his teeth. Uh.
So he did have fake teeth, but they were I
think the bases were made from ivory and tusk and
stuff like that, but the human the teeth were actually
human teeth. They were from We talked about grave robbing
in the live episode that we did. They would grave

(41:40):
rob for teeth. Good teeth. They would people poor people
that had decent teeth would sell their teeth for money.
They actually documented that he paid his slaves for teeth, which,
on the one hand, you're like, oh, that's pretty cool
he actually paid his slaves rather than said, go bring
me some of my slaves teeth. But at the same time,
I was reading about it and they were like, it
doesn't matter really what he paid him, unless it was
just some eye popping amount. It's still like it's an

(42:04):
inherently inequitable transaction. But um, I do feel bad for
George Washington in that. Um he he apparently kind of
suffered with his teeth. Like, there's nobody, especially in America,
whose teeth have ever been talked about and written about
more than George Washington. You are a close second, but

(42:25):
he's definitely the first, first place winner. And um he
apparently one of the reasons why he wore dentures and
like kind of suffered through this and and and insisted
on wearing them all the time was because his he
was the face of this new nation. He was the
first president, right and at the time it was it

(42:47):
was um his vitality, his health, his strength was basically
the same as the nation's health and strength, and so
for him to show any kind of weakness or problem
or disease or anything like that would make people wonder like, oh,
does that also mean that this new American experiment is
also diseased and problem as problems And so in a

(43:08):
way like he really kind of carried this burden for
the country, for the image of the country. But um, yeah,
his teeth are he had like no teeth by the
time he was fifty one. They all fell out, and
they started falling out when he was in his early twenties.
I was talking to you because I was like, we've
seen his teeth, and I thought we both actually thought

(43:30):
that maybe we saw it at the the Memorial Masonic
Temple and in Old Town Alexandria. But I don't think
they're there. So we think we saw him in Mountain
Vernon because supposedly that's where they are. But both of
us remember seeing them at that Masonic Temple. I've been
to Mount Vernon a couple of times. I don't remember
seeing his teeth, So I wonder if we did see

(43:51):
his teeth at the Masonic Temple and they moved into
Mountain Vernon and now I'm looking on the internet. It's like, no,
they're at Mountain Vernon. Silly. Maybe it was a museum
of sex. They had George Washington's chattering teeth. So now
we move on to X rays, which were discovered in
by German scientists. They started using those on the mouth

(44:13):
pretty quickly, but a thing kind of popped up early
on that it ended up being bad and that they
didn't really know how to read X rays that well,
at least probably everywhere at first, but at least around
the mouth. And they discovered these things a condition when
they would take the teeth in the jaw X rays
where they would find pockets of infection under the gum line,

(44:37):
which now we just know are I mean, what is
that just pockets of infection pus mouth pus. Yeah. Um.
They called them focal infections. And the problem is is,
I mean, it's a good thing that they spotted these,
but they didn't know what they were, so they linked
it to other stuff and other organs of the bodies,
sometimes the brain even, and it become it became almost

(44:59):
like a new version of blood letting in that for
a while, if you had almost anything going wrong with you,
sometimes and they showed, uh, these these pockets on the
X ray. They would just pull your teeth like if
you had a kidney disorder, they would pull your teeth first. Yeah,
there was a guy who was apparently one of the
leading proponents and practitioners of this focal infection hysteria. His

(45:21):
name was Henry Cotton. He worked at the New Jersey
State Lunatic Asylum is what they called at the time,
between nineteen oh seven and nineteen thirty and he he
and his team pulled eleven thousand human teeth during that time,
including his own teeth, his wife's teeth, his children's teeth,

(45:41):
but mostly inmates of this asylum. And the idea was
that that infection had gone to your brain, so you
had to pull the teeth out around it to treat
the infection to cure your mental illness. And it just
so happens, Chuck, that our good friend, our dear friend,
beloved friend, John Hodgman played that man on the TV
show of the Nick Oh, that's true, was that his character? Yeah,

(46:04):
that guy existed in real life Hodgman's character and I
read I came across a mention of it in Paste
magazine said that um Hodgman played Henry Cotton quote with
perfect offhand authority. I think it's one. But yeah, I
didn't remember that he was playing Henry Cotton, this guy
who was just pulling eleven thousand teeth from people over

(46:26):
twenty three years to cure their mental illness, which is nuts,
but it actually happened. You have to text him let
him know we were talking about his acting career. I will.
I'm sure he'll hear it when this comes out. He
listens to every episode. The moment that really doesn't, someone
will let him know. Uh. And then we wind out
to kind of a guy who um weirdly ended up

(46:49):
being uh for the wrong reasons, the person who changed
dentistry for the better, and that he was not a
good dentist. And he was came along at a time
when the a d A had just formed in eighteen
fifty nine. They met at Niagara Falls formed the a
d A in eighteen sixty six. They said, you can't
use you can't be a snake oil salesman anymore. You

(47:11):
can't have these advertisements and personally solicit uh business like
we gotta we gotta kind of put ourselves up there
with the doctors guys and not do this stuff. And
a dude came along that defied all that so much
so that they really started to sort of codify and
put that stuff in the rear view mirror. Well, they
were trying to figure out how to differentiate themselves from

(47:32):
just people who pulled teeth for a living but didn't
go to dental school. And it's hard to do that, um.
And they a way to do that is defined a
scapegoat and point out how terrible they are, to to
use them as an example of how great you are,
right to make yourselves look good. And that's what they
did with this guy, Edgar Randolph Painless Parker, who was

(47:55):
very much as snake oil salesman, a charlatan. He was
of the m of the kind of dentists that he
actually did go to dental school. But he he was like,
I'm losing money to these these tooth pullers, these tooth drawers,
so I'm gonna start advertising again, and I think while
I'm at it all, start making sneak coil and all
that stuff. Um. But he was of the school where
you would just like fill a tooth um with a

(48:19):
like like amalgam, say mercury or something like that. And um,
you wouldn't get rid of any of the decay, well
you would, your face would still rot off regardless. But yes,
your dental visit was painless because they didn't they didn't
scrape out any of the cavity to start. Um, that's
who they were competing against. So they used this guy
to basically say all this stuff. This guy is doing.

(48:40):
This guy right here, that's not dentistry. Come over here.
What we're doing is actual dentistry. It's going to help
your health. Yeah, and he like, like you said, he
went to dental school. He went to the Philadelphia Dental College,
but apparently he literally did not pass, like he would
not have earned a degree had he not gone, and
begged the dan to let him through. And I guess

(49:02):
he sounds like sort of a squeaky wheel kind and
I think they just wanted to be rid of him,
so they said, fine, here's your degree. And so that's
when he went to Canada and sat in an empty
office because he couldn't he wasn't losing, like patients were
coming and leaving, like he didn't have any patients to
begin with. And um, so yeah, he started doing the
snake whole thing, and he literally went back in time

(49:24):
to become like a dental drawer and had these big
sort of tooth pulling events and parties with the band
just like they were in the heyday in the early
eighteenth century, same same exact thing. Unbelievable. He also supposedly
wore a necklace of three hundred and fifty seven extracted
teeth that he supposedly pulled all in one day, which

(49:48):
is what I made for a good live show. Oh well,
let's save it. I don't think so this is all
the makings of a great live show. Well, there's a
whole thing. I agreed. There's a whole thing that we
didn't even get to talk about called the amalgam Wars,
which I think we're going to do with short stuff
on because it was pretty interesting too. All right, Okay,
I'm up. I'm up for it. So that's if for

(50:09):
now for the history of dentistry. This may be an
ongoing thing. Who knows? And uh, since I said this
may be an ongoing thing, who knows? It's time of
course for listener mail, I'm gonna call this I missed
opportunity for a pavement reference. Oh yeah, I saw this one.

(50:30):
Did you see this? This is from Alan Coleman, and
this is about the Salem witch Trials. And I can't
believe I walked right past this because this this is
one of my favorite Pavement songs. He said, Hey, guys,
love the podcast. I'm not one of those the chairs
being able to send into correction, so this isn't one
of those. I listened to Salem Witchcraft Trials and notice
an unexpected omission being a big pavement in Silver Jeice Fan.

(50:51):
For the majority of my life, I enjoy hearing your
references occasionally. So I saw the title and I knew
that you had mentioned the Pavement song Give It a Day,
which is about Increase and Cotton Mather. Uh good work.
Stay alert for those possible Pavement references. And I'm gonna
read the first verse of that song because I know
this song and it never really occurred to me. That's
why I didn't get the ref in the episode. But

(51:13):
it's kind of the most pavement of all Pavement songs, Uh.
Increased mother told her dad. By the way he says
her dad, I roundly disagree with you. Your vocals styles
too preachy, and the yokels mock your teaching, but Cotton
he was just so oblivious to all their cutting. Please.
Soon the town folk took to it, and every pew
they looked to him for guidance, just like eyeless lambs

(51:35):
awaiting that old kebab. Stand the skeptics formed the nation's born.
They want to have it Cotton's dream, but Increase had
them mounted and they burned on open fires. So the
words spread, just like smallpox in the Sudan, and the
gentry cried, give it a day, Give it a day,
Give it a day. That sounds pretty pavement. You're You're right,

(51:57):
it's even when you listen to it, it's like it's
like Steve Malcomus. It is most words, smithy working all
those words in there album. Uh. I think that was
from an EP If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't on
a regular LP. I've definitely not heard that one, but
thanks to Alan Coleman for that. I walked right past
that way to go to Bob in Nostanovitch. If you're

(52:19):
listening there, you go, uh, Well, if you want to
get in touch with this like Alan did, or if
you want to say hi and you're Bob Nostandovitch Chuck
always likes hearing from you, Bob, Please right in. You
can get in touch with this via email at stuff
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know

(52:39):
is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.