Tooth, Mind and Soul: Dental Modification

my my wisdom teeth yanked out. Yeah, it was had this. It was in a super weird kind of headspace about it because for most of my life my dad had been my dentist, and so I'm kind of getting these weird, like illogical feelings of like, you can't be my dentist, you're not my dad, yeah, kind of thing going on. And then and then yeah, it sucks to have your

your teeth worked on. Yeah, And well that's that's a perfect sort of allegory actually, because you know what we're gonna be talking about today is the cultural ramifications and connections to modifying your teeth. Uh. In my case. I you know, I haven't had a ton done, but I did have my wisdom teeth taking out as well in

my early twenties, and it was a nightmare. I remember, you know, I was a poor college student at the time, and I like had the procedure done and I woke up and was just like bleeding everywhere, and my girlfriend at the time had to take me back to her place where I was supposed to like rest up for two days, you know. And it's just I wasn't like equipped maturity wise to deal with that kind of a procedure.

And like weeks later, like I forget what they call it in dental practice, but like fragments of tooth would like work their way up through my gums. It was. It was horrifying. Yeah, when I had mine out, my my wife picked me up from the procedure and uh and almost fainted when I took the bloody gauze out. Yeah. Yeah,

Oh that's the weirdest, is the bloody gauze. So we're gonna be talking about the body modification of teeth in various cultures around the world, but I think it's a good starting point for us to sort of compare our own dental horror stories in Western culture because it's fairly similar, you know, Yeah, I mean it scenario where a lot of people have a lot of well deserved anxiety, and not only because dental surgery kind of sucks and dental pain sucks, but also because these are the only teeth

you have, and when you start having problems with them, it's this damning reminder of your mortality. Yeah. I think it was Tina Fey and her autobiography. She had this great line that I remember above all else in that book. She says, the mouth dies first, talking about just as older and like not not even necessarily procedures you have to have done, but just like like dealing with like the breath of an older person. You know, it's like, oh,

my breath smells so bad in the morning. What's going on? And this feeling that that the rest of me still feels young, but my my teeth are on this uh, this irreversible path to the grave. Well, Tina fe then would probably understand some of the cultures we're going to talk about today, especially when it comes to tooth extraction and which is also referred to as ablation, uh, and the idea that you know, by preemptively yanking them out of your head, you're sort of cutting off disease at

the past. Yeah. So we're gonna talk about different cultural rituals and practices that involve the the the shaving of teeth, the filing of teeth, the sharpening of teeth, the removal of teeth. But before we even get into the details of any of these practice, I think it's important to

really connect those practices to our modern dental obsessions. And we have a wonderful quote here, um that you're about to read, and it's from one of the sources that we use on this episode, the Cultural Modification of Teeth by Clark Johnson, d D, s pH D. Yeah, he really nailed it, and I think that it provided an excellent overview that seemed to be mostly for people in school for dent a practice, but giving them an idea

of you know what without there in the larger scale. Okay, So he says, an alien visitor to Earth might describe a tooth related cult now common in many industrialized societies. The people believe in the tooth cult so unquestionable they call the Holy Doers doctor. The cult requires an initiation wherein the holy material objects are fastened to their teeth. Then they go through to two difficult years of trial until they emerge purified and the holy material objects are

taken off in a right of passage. These people live in a society that admires what it sees on billboards in magazines, in a mystical place they call Hollywood. Both believers and priests learn their ideals there. The practitioners of the cult have an obsession with lines and angles. I really like that that and I think that it's an important distinction for us to set up to as Westerners.

And we may have some listeners out out there who are familiar with some of these cultures that we're gonna be talking about, but as Westerners, we mess around with our teeth just as much as some of this stuff that we're about to talk about. That's gonna seem weird

and sort of cult dish, right, Yeah. I mean it's especially when you look at the cult of the Hollywood smile, Like how much time and energy goes into the straightening, whitening, and not only just the physical manipulation of the teeth, but then placing uh, you know, essentially fake teeth over those teeth. And sculpting them down and just getting everything

perfectly lined up for that magazine worthy smile. So before we dive into the first chunk here where we're going to talk about everything except for the extraction, let's remind uh you the listener out there, if you're new to the show, there's a bunch of stuff that we do other than just podcasting. So Stuff to Blow Your Mind is Robert myself and Joe McCormick, and we podcast, but

we also do videos. We also write articles. We all work out of how stuff works, and you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler where we're all blow the Mind as our handle, and we curate throughout the week various weird science, kind of bizarre oddity articles as well as our own content and Stuff to Blow your Mind. Dot com is the mothership where you can find most of that content, right Yeah, So let's get down to it. Let's just start with teeth. Well, what are some of

the main reasons we have teeth to begin with? Yeah, well, you know, when we think about it, the essential functions for our teeth are mastication, speech, and then there's the aesthetic part, right um, And you know here in Western society. I know that most of us worry about the whiteness of our teeth, or the shape of our teeth, or or how they smell, right, all of those kinds of things. But there are also anthropological what are referred to as

para masticatory functions of teeth. And this is where teeth are altered by intent or sometimes in what's called like an unconscious accident or maybe some kind of behavioral result. Right now, okay, you might be reeling from this idea already. You might be one of those people who doesn't like going to the dentist, and there's that you know, there's that special kind of person persons. Now you know what

I mean. Isn't there like a particular kind of dentist you can go to if you have a little bit of trauma associated with dental practice that's like quiet and they play soft music and they're like very gentle about the way they go about things. I forget what there's a name for it, but I've I've read about it before. But so if you're that, you know, type of patient for dentists, you might be reeling from this idea already about body modification culture in general, especially when it comes

to your mouth. Yeah, Like I know, having read a lot of Stephen King, especially in my junior nine teen years, I feel like that was something Keen would come back to time and time again. It's the image of an individual with with sharpened teeth because on one hand, it's it's like they've completely given themselves over to some sort of animalistic uh quality, and and at the same time it's irreversible. Right, you've how could you try teeth? Yeah,

And you know, there's our fascination with vampires. There's just the idea of exactly like kind of what you're mentioning, like the the canine teeth of the human being sort of a representation of our primal nature, right, Yeah, because of course we have teeth for tearing, teeth for crushing, all important for our omnivorous diet. But h yeah. And then also it's worth noting that you know, historically teeth

have come in handy for tool use. We don't recommend it, but it is they can be used as a tool, and that's another way they can be altered for sure, right, if you're like chewing on rope or something like. Right, But then also you know, self defense, um, situations as

well as a last ditch scenario, humans can bite. So what the important thing to remember here as we're going over this is that, you know, teeth are artifacts of human behavior, just in the same way as like our clothing are, and as such, we modify them in ways to communicate with others nonverbally. My experience in in communications

theory is this is referred to as artifactual communication. Right, So whereas like we might brush our teeth or wear braces or um white in our teeth or something like that, and other societies they're drilling holes into their teeth and mounting jewels in them, or they're dyeing them black, right, or they're ripping them out of their gums. And that's

what we're gonna be talking about today. One theory about this is that it's a form of costly signaling theory, and this theory argues that in certain cultures, individuals employ what are usually costly, monetarily wise signals that help one receive rewards, and usually that's in the form of a mate. Okay, so you this is the kind of thing you would see if you went down to the beach and you saw, say a dude who has really put in a lot of time and money on his zeke, and maybe he's

covered with a bunch of tattoos to boot exactly. Yeah, and even to some Western dentists, these practices that we're going to talk about today are going to seem totally weird and and maybe unhealthy in some situations too. Right, But you know, we have to remember that our own traditions are considered absolute in our culture, and our ideas about teeth are just as culturally determined as say the Balinese or the Acadian French Canadian population we're going to

talk about today. So okay, let's let's get into it. We've got chipping, filing, staining, banding, jewel inlays. Let's start with how human beings modify their teeth, right, So what is so? What are some of the earliest known examples of this when we look back at the at the archaeological data. So the oldest known example are the Etruscans, and this is in seventh century b C. They took flat gold bands and they would hold their real teeth or sometimes fake teeth in place with these gold bands

in their mouths. Now, only women wore these devices, and the surviving pieces have been found in dig sites in the Italian region of Lazio. Uh. It's thought that these generally denoted wealth in some kind of high status, because those were the kind of grave sites that they were found in. Um. But there's also been examples from ancient cultures of covering your teeth in gold everywhere from Rome to China. So that's that's a fairly common thing that

goes back a while. It's not just like a new fat and of course, yeah, and to your point, continues on to this day. Yeah. So it's just a perfectly human obsessions since time out of mind, right, Yeah, I mean, like the the the current culture of like caps and grills is especially like similar to these kinds of things. And here in Atlanta, I mean just downtown Atlanta. There's several places I used to work down there when I

was working at the university. There's all kinds of places where you can just walk in and get your grills set up. Um. So it is a you know, common cultural phenomenon today as well. With the golden lays. Now, one of the examples of dental modification that that that I've found particularly fascinating and have blogged on in the past is a Balinese tooth filing. So this takes place in the Indian Indonesian island of Bali. And uh, this

is in in in this particular society. It's those carnivorous teeth that we've we've touched on already, the canines and incisors. So these are viewed as sort of you know, be steel teeth is representing the b steal nature of humanity. And so here we find tooth filing is a rite of passage into adulthood and a key indicator of social, aesthetic and spiritual well being. Okay, and the key here

is that they're not filing their teeth into points. They're actually filing them down to they're flatter, right right, it's almost you know, to create a more um you know, vegetarian dental arrangement. Yeah. They smooth away the thing like qualities of of the human teeth, and in doing so they smooth away that the savage aspects of their soul.

That's the approach here. Uh. And ideally the ritualized procedure is performed by a Brahmin priest, though you can actually get your local Balinese dentist to manage it as well, and if you can't afford to filing this is this is amazing. They are charitable organizations or you may be able to get a sponsor, an individual to sponsor you so that you can receive the procedure. Like that's the cultural way that it is. Yeah, so it's that important society.

And so from what I was reading, my understanding was that this is a practice that has both localized traditional history, but then it also has some Hindu uh religious qualities that got merged into it when Hinduism became popular in the region. Yeah, it's a it's an ancient custom predates

Hinduism's arrival on the island in the fifth century BC. Uh. And as often, you know, as the case, the the old ways merged with the new ways and it becomes this uh, you know, this hugely important things so important that if you if you die with un modified teeth, then then the teeth of your corpse can even be filed down to ensure your passage into the spirit room. And you probably don't need a specialist for that at that point. They can just you know, like your brother

can do it. Yeah, I'm guessing maybe it requires a little less care and finesse the symbolic power. This is pretty crazy too, because if anyone out there is familiar with Balinese art, like then I should be able to just say, bolly Balinese art and you should get certain pictures of they're they're more common motifs in your mind,

you know, particularly you see this. There's a character named Boma, the Son of the Earth, and he's the awards off evil uh spirits and uh and and he looks like some sort of a demon to sort of Western eyes, and he has these big h you know things and all. According to British anthropologist Anthony Forge, that's a great name for an anthropologist by the Forge of anthropology. Here he's noted that this dental obsession manifests itself in the art.

And so you see the teeth of supernatural entities such as the gods and spirits take on exaggerated, uh be stual form, you know, giant canines to symbolize the opposite of desired human qualities. Okay, I'm thinking of like some of the kind of like um tribal masks that I've seen from certain Pacific island cultures. Yeah, exactly, that kind of you know, like huge things because it's beautiful stuff. But it's interesting how in looking at the way that

the teeth of their spirits are represented in their art. Uh, Like that reflects too in their their body modification and the the alteration of their teeth for for purely aesthetic spiritual and you know, in cultural reasons. Yeah, that makes sense. And there's a couple of other examples that we're going to talk about in the episode today where that that's similar and that the deification of the of the teeth

shows up in visual representations of gods or myths. Yeah, okay, Well, another brief look here at some people who file their teeth for dental modification is the I've been people of Borneo, uh, and they further beautified their teeth by they both blacken and file it. But then what they do is they drill a hole in the middle of each tooth and then place a brass stud in this hole, so every

tooth has like a tiny little breast stud in its center. Also, the May people of Vietnam, they have their incisors chipped and ground down to the gum line. Uh. And this is something that was deliberately done in in terms of like staining back when they were. This is before it was Vietnam, when it was referred to as French colonial annam. I think I'm saying that right, uh, And every person was expected to have their teeth blackened by what was

quote a very painful process. Um. So for for those of us who are afraid of going to the dentist, can you imagine just you know, somebody going at you with in a lot of cases easier just with like stones. That's how they're they're filing their teeth down. And then the blackening usually occurs with some some kind of combination

of like charcoal or plants. Yeah, they're actually one of the practices in modern Mayanmar is the the chewing of particular um, you know, root substances to to black to help black and yeah, well the moy did it as like a beautification thing basically, and the idea was that if you didn't do it, you weren't an adult and

you couldn't get married. So nobody again, like it's like it's our version of the Hollywood smile, right, Like, like they weren't considered on equal level of maturity until they had done this, And some tribes even gave their lower jaws like a saw shape with the filing combination, so that's kind of interesting, and then meso American teeth filing.

There there was a lot more research on on this from what I could find, but basically it's a combination of the filing cross hatch designs like carving cross hatches into your teeth, and then the jewel inlays as well. So this was frequent in young adults in what is referred to as late Classic Mayan sights. And I went and looked that up to to you know, some kind of placement here in history. It's around a D five

fifty to eight thirty. Okay. Uh. Many investigators believed at the time that dental mutilation correlated with high social position, So we're seeing a theme here, right. This seems to be going along with almost all of these. It's a social status. You need to be able to pay a doctor slash artisan to transform your teeth into the desired form,

which is the same thing that we have today. Yeah. Yeah, uh So there's a collection actually at the Institute o National day Anthropologia a Historia in Mexico City where they have a thousand, two hundred and twelve teeth that's a very specific ammounity from this period of time. But yeah, mainly these were filed down with stones. The cross hatch patterns were carved into what's referred to as the labial surface of the tooth, and then they would put in

jewel incrustation or inlays um. They're basically grills that aren't removable. Uh. And they would use all kinds of different stones for this. They used pyrite, j dite, turquoise, hematite, serpentine, mother of pearl, cinnabar, or gold set into the surface of the teeth. The most popular and common where the iron pyrite and the jade. Though, and the way that they did this, this is the part that's crazy to me. Like I normally don't have

any problems when I go to the dentist. I'm pretty cool with them, you know, doing all the stuff in there. And they could the little suction host and stare at the ceiling. Yeah. The TV, which always bothers me a little bit because I don't really want to watch the TV. I don't know if I want you watching the TV exactly while you're working on my mouth. Yeah, I've had people like comment like can you believe that? Like, while they're working on my mouth, and I'm like trying not

to pay attention to the TV. But yeah, uh so in Misso America Mayan culture, what they would do is they didn't of the TV, but they would take a rotating fine tube of quartz or some other kind of resistant stone and they would rotate it slowly against the surface of the enamel of your teeth. They'd add water in an abrasive powder or sand to help drill it out. For this inlay, they would possibly use what's called a bow drill as well, which I looked this up. It

basically looks like what you would think. It looks like a bow for a bow and arrow, and then in the middle, instead of having an arrow, there's there's this quartz tube thing that kind of spins apart sometimes that used as a fire making up. Yeah, exactly, yep. Uh. And so this was probably somewhere around seven hundred nine d and one theory is that this filing occurred because okay, here we go again with the d D thing. The Maso Americans were honoring a particular solar deity who is

depicted as having filed teeth. So this was a way to show their admiration for him. Some of the skeletons that are found in the archaeological record there show incomplete inlays as well. Uh, and they think that this might be because the pain was actually so much that some people couldn't go through with it, or that the individual died before it was finished. And death was also possible fairly soon after because there was a high risk of

bacterial encephalitis after these procedures. So one of the pieces that we read for this is a thesis paper by a woman named Daniel Barnes, and we're gonna come back and cite this a lot, but I want to insert this here because the main argument of her thesis was that, and I'm quoting her here, since death is a possible outcome of intentional dental modification, it should be considered a

high risk procedure. So her point with all of this was she sort of showcases all of the different anthropological modifications of teeth and then says, you know, think about this in context of today and how we modify her teeth today, and that there's some danger involved there. But she does point out that things like add and grows and caps or modern dental procedures you know that that

that's not what she's talking about here. She's talking about instances like trying to file your teeth down with stone, or as we're going to talk about later, you know, the extraction of all of the teeth from your lower jaw or something like that, which even today you're going and get your wisdom teeth removed. They put you under anesthesia. There's always that slim possibility that you won't wake up. Yeah,

I always have that thing. So I am used to be diagnosed with something called a mitro valve pro lapse, which is one of the valves in my heart wasn't fluttering the right way or something like that. That's why you don't love Christmas? Yeah, exactly. So when you have a mitro valve prolapse, whenever you go to the dentist. You might have heard of this since your dad was

a dentist. You have to take antibiotics because they're worried that the bacteria that they're messing around within your mouth is going to go down and somehow infect your your heart because the valve apparently makes you more susceptible to infections. This is interesting. Uh, we'll put a pin in that tidbit will become important later on in the podcast. Oh yeah, yeah, of course. So okay, so we're wrapping up on the meso American Mayans there, but they've really got this, you know,

beautiful jewelry embedded in their teeth. Uh. And then there's the staining of the teeth that we want to come to. So there's enemies staining, right, Yeah, First of all, there's the the enemies who have already covered. And then I believe we also have Japanese practice as well. Yeah, and so Japanese women used to die this is a specific culture called Yaba. I believe they used to dye their teeth black with tannin powder and a ferris ascetate solution.

And they considered this again high fashion and uh it signified marital status. It was unknown at the time, but they also, uh you know, realized this protected their teeth from bacterial colonization. So maybe that's what they should have done to me at the dentist instead has just given me like a solution of tannin powder or and ferres

acetate rather than you know, make me take antibiotics. This was also done this kind of standing practice in places like Peru, Ecuador, Vietnam, as we talked about Laos, Thailand, the Philippines, and Africa. In Nigeria, some people stain their teeth with something called the solen um in cannum flowers, and those are apparently a relative of eggplants, or they use something called Nicotania tobaccum, which is, as it sounds, an herb containing nicotine that sounds like it would actually

be kind of cool. It's like it's like, what do you call it? Um? Yep? Yeah, yeah, which of course can also stain your teeth um. You know, we already mentioned the enemies a couple of times, but they had an interesting saying that goes along with the staining, and that is that any dog can have white teeth, which is it puts an interesting twist on it, right, It goes back to that whole I am human, and in being human, how am I different? Founderstand? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

And as I was thinking about this, because I brushed my dog's teeth for and I was thinking about this that like his obviously his canine teeth are very pronounced, right, So I'm just trying to imagine like an anthropological dog, like humanized dog kind of culture where they're filing down their cane teeth. It gets back to what we talked

about on our Christmas episode. Remember in Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, there's the whole thing with that and just Elf and he removes all of the yet e the bumbles teeth, the Abominable Snowman, he pulls all of his teeth out of his head. So there's some ablation practice going on there, oh for sure. So definitely keep Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer in your mind when we come back from this break and start discussing dental extraction, mental illness,

and science. All right, we're back. So yeah, you're probably thinking, Okay, so we've talked about the ways to just change the

way your teeth look. And I feel like, for the most part, that's easier for us to get on board with because we look, again, we've already touched on how we're always altering the way our teeth appear, uh here and in our modern Western civilization, and so we can say, all right, I would not personally want to file my teeth down or make them into little sharpened points, but I can see where that lines up with our existing

view of things. But then how does it make sense? Right, how do we get into the place where one just removes the tooth or removes a bunch of teeth for seemingly purely supernatural, superstitious or cultural reasons. Right, This isn't like you have a bad cavity and the only way to take care of it is the yank the tooth. That right. In particular, there's deciduous teeth removal that's popular

in certain African tribal cultures. Uh. And it seems like they purposely damage what's referred to as the tooth germ. This is sort of like the growing tooth underneath your baby teeth, I think, And they damn it's that so that uh, you know, it just doesn't grow in. You don't have a full tooth there. And in general African ablation,

it seems like it's kind of common with cultures. Uh. And I might get some of these names wrong, but these are the tribal cultures Amhara, Azande, Massai, new Air Bakiga, a Koli, Baitarros, boogisas uh and that's in Uganda, and then the Hia of Tanzania. And so this was one of the fascinating things that I read about and I think that you saw as well. And it was an Eon magazine, right, Yeah, there's a wonderful piece in Ian magazine by Brendan Borel. Yeah, it explores what's known as

a beano or false tooth disease in Uganda. So the it's also referred to as a tooth word. Yeah, it's I guess with a lot of things supernatural and uh and fulkloric. It seems like it has a There are a lot of different versions of what exactly it is. I think, so yeah, it seems like well older versions of this. I don't think that this is modern culture. For them, they believed that the toothworm was a possible demonic presence. That was it emerged when they saw pulp

coming out of damaged teeth. Um. So the tooth nerves the nerves inside our teeth. Hopefully none of us have actually seen this. I haven't. When they're exposed, they have a kind of worm like appearance to them. Uh. And so there's evidence that back in two d and fifty b c e. Physicians would smoke tooth worms out of the teeth by using nanbane seed that was needed into bees wax. That doesn't sound like it would be particularly

fun either. Uh. And then the idea here is that it would just destroy the nerves in your tooth, so if you had any pain there that would obviously disappear. I don't think you're actually getting at the quote unquote toothworm. You're just killing the nerves in your teeth, so you can't feel anything, right, and in this you know it can't. We're kind of getting to the root, if you will, of this um of this scenario, because because we're gonna talk about some of the more you know, elaborate and

to our eyes, you know, nonsensical versions of it. But at heart, you're dealing with somebody in an in an older time, with limited resources and understanding, trying to address physical pain, trying to deal with anomaly, denal anomalies, and and and address them surgically. But as Brendan Barrell points out, he just put this wonderfully in the article. Uh. He refers to a quote sense of impotence in the face

of bodily mysteries. And I feel like that comes back a time time and time again in this extraction section of our podcast. Be here, because you have people trying to deal with this illness, deal with this pain, deal with this situation, and the best of their understanding seems to point towards the removal of the problem tooth, or the removal of a problem tooth in hopes of addressing it. Man.

I mean, I go back to that Tina Fake quote that game at the beginning, like feel like, you know, I'm closing in on forty here, and I feel like I'm just starting to get to that point of these bodily mysteries, you know, like it's like, wait, when where did this like piece of flesh come from? I don't remember this? Or why does this hurt when I wake

up in the morning. Kyle Canane has this bit about how when he wakes up in the morning, his whole body sounds like a bag of popcorn just out of the microwave because it's all popping and everything like that. That's and I'm I'm getting to that point too. And you know, I'm no doctor. I don't know, so I go into my doctor and I go, hey, what's going on.

In the same way these people probably went to their you know, localized version of a doctor and we're like, all right, give it to me with the nanbane seed in the bees wax, because I don't know what's happening in my mouth now, the false tooth disease, the the abino. Uh. It also ends up, you know, applying a lot to children. So you have you have an infant, sick, infant, infants complaining, and so there's the belief that the child might have this worm tooth in their head, this cursed tooth that

could result in the emergence of gum maggots. Uh. And then this is going to you know, just roll out of control, and that the causes here can range from just you know, infected maze to outright bewitchment. In fact, in the the magazine article, they referenced one attributed causes just passing a false tooth on the road. Huh. So there's a lot of superstition that gets rolled up at this, and then the only way to deal with it is you don't go to the hospital. You go to a

traditional healer for the tooth removal. Yeah. One of the articles that we referenced for this, they referred to traditional healers so many times that the author eventually just started calling them thch. It took me a little while. What's th h oh, traditional healer. Yeah. One of the papers we're looking at two thousand eleven paper published in the Journal of eth no Biology and ethno Medicine, and they

put a lot of this and some interesting context. They said that in cameraon, for instance, traditional healers actually do a pretty decent job at tooth extracting. And most of the the examples they looked at, and again this was in twenty eleven, you know very much, you know modern times, Uh, most of the examples of tooth extraction stemmed from legitimate concerns such as tooth pain, looseness of the teeth, or

or some sort of visible hole in the tooth. And so while this paper criticized, of course a lack of lack of standard infection control methods and proper dental anatomy understanding among the traditional healers, the paper ultimately suggested, like the answer here is not to just tell all the traditional healers to go away, but try and bridge the world between modern dental practices and traditional healers. Yeah, so that they're communicating with one another and they've sort of

got a bit of understanding. I remember from that one piece that some of the data was surprising, Like one of the things they're looking at was like how often they wore gloves when they moved between different patients and we're like extracting teeth and then but then there was other instances. I think they said something like three quarter of the traditional healers if it was like a serious dental problem, they would recommend you need to go see

an actual dentist. Like what I'm doing here isn't isn't gonna cure your problem here. Yeah, And indeed, to come back to the ugantin situation with the false tooth disease, the Ian magazine article points out, there, you know a number of contributing factors as to why the individual would go to the traditional healer versus the modern hospital and with their sick child. I would suspect that money is

one of them. Oh yeah, it's generally cheaper. We're talking about an impoverished region where available Western medicine is still distrusted. You have high mortality rates in the modern hospital's corruption, expense,

facility shortcomings. Uh, and it all results, you know, in a modern health system that feels alien and maybe even a bit dangerous to someone accustomed to that culturally ingrained traditional healer system that is also just gonna it's just gonna be so much more comfortable, and you're gonna end up having more faith in its ability to cure what

ails you. And to give you an idea of the numbers we're talking about here, So this is and day in certain villages in Tanzania, sixty percent of people have their teeth intentionally removed, sixteen percent in northern Uganda, in the Sudan of Ethiopian Jews, and then seventy percent of other Ethiopians do this, and then the real high point was eight seven percent of the Messia and Kenya do this.

The Massai say that there there's a medical reason though right there there's no longer this demonic toothworm thing um. They're removing mandibular central incisors UH, specifically in some situations so that they can help feed a person if they end up with tetanus and subsequently get locked jaw from that. So they want to make sure that there's a way,

you know, if their jaw is locked shut. In our societies, we view the whole thing of the straws and everything, or we have I V s or whatever, but you know, in this situation they're thinking ahead. Yeah, and then there is another thing. I read This is very brief, so I don't know how much, uh, there is to this, and I'd love to hear if somebody in our audience

knows a little more about it. But apparently the Demera people in South Africa, they say that the reason they remove their maxillary anterior teeth is so that they can properly speak their language, which has a lisp to it. Huh though. That is interesting as well and certainly something that stands out from our other examples the idea of augmenting your teeth so as to augment speech, because that's

something we didn't mention earlier. But having a full set of teeth also plays an end your ability to to to speak. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now another example of dental augmentation comes to us. This was actually suggested to us to us by one of our South African listeners, Sheldon. Uh.

Maybe Sheldon knows about the Demorrow thing. Yeah, yeah, maybe she can throw in on that as well, But in this case, she was saying she pointed out what's known as the cape flat smile and sometimes kind of erroneously referred to as a passion gap. So what we're talking about here is the removal of the front teeth, the front incisors amongst communities of the Western Cape in South Africa specifically, it's something you see among poor male teenagers

that are wrapped up in gain culture. Uh. And it's it's a modern practice. You still see it today, and the practice seems to serve it's part of a write a passage into adulthood. The passion gap thing. I'm not gonna get into the details, but that seems to be something where outsiders misconstrue or even decide to sort of demonize it by saying that has some sort of a sexual connotation. But there it doesn't seem to be anything

to back it up. Now, it's not the kind of thing that you would go to the dentist for, or apparently you could, but you might have to find a dentist that would who would do this procedure. Imagine it's like sort of the difference between getting like your friend to give you a tattoo and then like going and spending like a lot of money at a fancy tattoo parlor. And in this case, you you spend all that money, you take as much as you can you can actually uh dish out, and you go get a partial dental

insert to fill that gap. And here you see just you know, an explosion of gold and bling and whatever whatever you can afford. Um, Like some of the accounts say that, like basically, whenever you can upgrade to something a little fancier, you do. So. So here we see a little bit of the modern sort of bling culture.

We see some of these ancient practice we've already discussed, uh, you know, where you're just taking gold or jewels to brighten up the teeth, but in this case, it's about let's just go ahead and remove those front four teeth and just get something fancy and bright up in there. Yeah.

I can I mean I'm not familiar with this particular subculture, but I can imagine like both how it would denote status because you're showing off money in terms of like the particular jewel or metal that you're having put in your mouth. But then also just like hey, I'm tough enough to have somebody just take these teeth out. I don't need a gas mask, I don't need laughing gas. Yeah, it seems it seems to be a convergence of those

two to rent forces. And you were just telling me before the podcast episode, before we're gonna come in here to record it, you've seen some of this in South African hip hop, and I feel like, yeah, so, And I might be wrong here again, like our listeners in South Africa, please correct me. My only familiarity with South African hip hop is through Diante Word, which is fairly

popular internationally. But I really enjoy them. I've seen them tour in America and watched a bunch of their videos, and I feel like I've seen some of this missing front tooth action in those videos, but I don't know if that's particular to this subculture. And like with people in the background and performers and not the actual members of the band, but people who are just performing and dancing and stuff in the videos. All Right, we're gonna take another quick break, and when we come back, I

know what a lot of you are thinking. You're thinking, Hey, where we've talked about you know all these uh these other cultures that have that have used you know, ritual or unnecessary tooth extraction. Well hold on to your seats, because when we come back from the break, we're gonna

look at examples from Canada in the good old United States. Alright, we're back, so okay, Yeah, we had sort of set this up as saying, like, well, there's a Western perception of tooth modification that's very different from these other cultures that we're talking about, whether it's meso American or African or Asian. Right, and even in some cases they are Australian tribes where they performed abbelation as well. But we've got this going on right in Canada, right north of Maine. Yeah.

We we ran across this excellent paper, very intriguing paper um titled French Canadian prenuptial dental extractions in Acadian women. First report of a cultural tradition uh or Quebec practice. Uh. This was yeah, this was really interesting. Uh and apparently you know, it has has occurred in modern times among Acadians. These are a descendants of seventeenth or eighteenth century French colonists in regions of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick,

Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. And what was interesting about this paper was the author's goal was essentially to interview dentists in the region to find out if simply if they had ever been asked to perform this procedure. Yeah, as well as some interviews with with people who knew or or have this procedure, just to see, like to what extent is this a thing and not just a matter of like anan case, there's an urban myth um and it's and it's it's not it. It turns out

like her results were pretty positive. It turns out that this is a thing. Yeah. In these cases, the women undergo or in some cases they seek to undergo because they talked to Dennis too said turned down right, turned down, um, But they're seeking the extraction of all upper and or lower uh teeth to in order to obtain dentures prior to marry. Right. So the dentures are a dowry right from one family to another, and so they have to have their teeth removed to receive the dowry. Yeah, it's

uh you know. And again we kind of get back to some of these cases we talked about earlier, like at what at what point is there like a medical concern here, and then at what point does it become uh more complicated in terms of cultural uh you know

aesthetic values and made selection. Uh. There's at least one account in the paper, and it's you know, it's a little dubious, but I still want to mention it that alleges that this was a British practice by which a colonists prepared for the wilds of the New World and its lack of dental care by simply removing one's teeth and replacing them with dentures. That's ironic given how many jokes are made about British dental practice and in present

day society. Although yeah, I don't know how much stock I put into that. Yeah, I mean to a certain extent, based on what we've been reading about about the the acknowledged link between uh any of dental infection and how that could know and and and other health problems. I could imagine a scenario in which someone might think, or might be convinced, Hey, you've got some some tooth teeth issues going on already, you don't have the best dental health.

You're about to go to the wilds of Canada, whether you're not gonna have a dentist. Why don't you go ahead and get this out of the way. Why don't we go ahead and remove the problem teeth. Maybe just remove all those teeth, get some sort of dental um, you know, insert and they get some get some some some dentures in place, and then the only thing you have to worry about is cleaning those things in a

stream somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's fair. Well. One of the things that I thought was really fascinating about this particular article was some of the dentists are at least one of the dentist she interviewed was a Kadian was from this culture and was like, I've never heard of this before, and thought that they were joking, and then realized, oh, no, this is an actual practice. It's just I'm removed from this particular it's like a niche subculture within the Akadian people. Yeah,

it's a small, rare thing. But but when they poked around, they found that, yes, it did occur with enough frequency to suggest that it that it was an actual thing. It wasn't just you know, a few individuals here and there. So the author's core argument here is that this all may come down to just an uncertain grasp of those connections between oral health problems, pregnancy, and just overall health in general. Because certainly before the advent of antibiotics, various

medical medical conditions were blamed on chronic tooth infections. So if you can't figure out the source of en ailment and you know that there's a troublesome tooth, well then you just go ahead and yank it to be sure. Right, So what might have begun is a half blind attempt to ensure mother and child's survival in a harsh environment

may have become a brutal social norm. Okay. So the next example that you have here is actually another thing that we ended up talking about during that Christmas Listener mail episode, uh, in relation to the the Abominable Snowman having his teeth ripped out. Right, Because you're a big fan of the TV show The Nick, Yeah, I really love The Nick directed by Steven Soderberg. Clive Owens is

in it. Uh just a great look, fictionalized look at cutting edge medicine, like the frontier of medicine and just the ins and outs of running a hospital um in

turn of the century in New York City. And if you're a viewer of the show, you might remember that there's a character that pops up by the name of Dr Henry Cotton, and he's played fabulously by John Hodgman, Like, once you see this, you may find John Hodgmen less funny in real life like that, And I mean that is a compliment that's he does such a fine could see Yeah, I could see Hodgemen performing like a particularly

kind of creepy uh doctor type. Yeah, and he he but he manages the creepy in a way where it it's the most natural Hodgman performance I've ever seen. Like, he just does a great jobs. What's notable in the show is that he goes around basically prescribing full dental extraction for not only his mental patients, but also for his own children. Wow, okay, okay. And this isn't because like he's marrying them off and they need dowry dentures

or because of any particular cultural reason. Now, it seems to be a situation where it's like those teeth are gonna cause all sorts of horrible infections. They're just gonna it's gonna lead to madness. Better to just pull them all out now. And while fictionalized this, the writers of the nick actually basis character on a real guy, the real Dr Henry Cotton, who lived eighteen seventy six through nineteen thirty three, was a respected academic psychiatrist, and he

served as superintendent of New Jersey's Trenton State Hospital. And he was a huge proponent of modern medical practices. But when he when established methods proved ineffective in the physical treatment of mental illness, he turned to the bacteriological theory

of disease. Okay. And so this was like a general idea at the time that was, you know, depression or other mental illness stemmed from something going in the on in the body, some Oregon problem, right in a lot of cases like that I I had read about in

relation to this, it was the colon was being removed. Yeah, yeah, and we'll we'll get to that, but it's yeah, but I mean basically, this was a there was a lot of big games going on in medicine, and we were figuring out what the biological roots of things like cholera and malaria were. So it seeing that the sky was the limit and that we could just we we barreled down, we could find these problems and we could just completely take care of it. So yeah, Cotton decides to give

it a go. Uh, and in his day, there was a prominent theory from a fair of British surgeons that linked untreated infections in the gums and in the intestines to your point, uh and that, and the idea was that these untreated infections were toxifying the blood and this could result in pathological brain alterations. So Cotton took this theory ran with It's in nineteen he extracted the infected teeth from fifty mental patients. So these are just the

infected teeth. Uh. And then he takes a step back, but this doesn't seem to be doing any good, so then he goes back in and has to just all their teeth removed and uh. Then this doesn't work, so he continues to chase the decay as I've heard, I've heard the term thrown around and among dentists. Um. So the patients have clearly swallowed painted saliva stemming from their

oral infections. So he systematically removes tonsils, spleens, stomachs, colon's, the cervix, and amid all this butchery, he's reporting reporting curate from mental illness. But have any of his patients lived seizures? Jesus, that's the thing. Because at first everybody's like, oh, this huge access rate, this guy's doing good work, and he's smell pressed. Can you remove my stomach please? Yeah, I mean there's obviously I can see the sort of

correlation there. There's obviously a long history of and we talk we think about today with people who talk about ib s between you know, the mental connection to the digestive system. But I don't know that one necessitates the removal of the ride. I mean, the connections are there, it's yeah, it's just what do you do about those connections and what kind of assumptions do you jump to?

Because to your point about about you know, how many of these individuals are surviving, Uh, the mortality rate was thirty and so when that starts to get out, the enthusiasm for Cotton's cure here kind of you know, Peter's out a little bit and eventually psycho now psychoanalysis gained steam. But these procedures, particularly the surgeries and the removal of you know, intestinal material. This continues at Trenton Asylum until Cotton. Cotton dies of a heart attack in nineteen thirty three.

This actually reminds me of something that I'd like us to do an episode about is coffee animals, because I think that there's there's somewhat of a connection there, right that, like the fat of coffee animals that you feel better, you feel mentally better after you've kind of flushed your stem out this way again, the connection between the digestive

system and the mental process. Oh yeah, I mean you can get into the topic of rectal feeding, which Mary Roach explores in her book Gulp, which I highly recommend if you have your at all, into a bunch of weird digestive data about how the body actually works and some of the stuff we've done and exploring it. That's a great book to Jack and my wife's read it, and I know that it's come up on the show frequently in the past. I need to get on that.

So we're winding down here, but it is important to to bring things back around and touch on some of the the the the actual science, some of what current science is saying about the effects of tooth extraction on brain functionality. So, according to a two thousand fourteen paper from University College London published in Journal of the American Geriatric Society, memory and walking speeds of adults who have lost all of their teeth decline more rapidly than those

who still have some of their own teeth. Huh, that's interesting, Yeah, it's I mean, if we'll break down here, it's a little more problematically. I would imagine that. Yeah, I imagine that there's not a direct connection between those things, but that there's the aging process in itself is related to those Yeah, because you have to ask questions, why why did this individual loser teeth? You know, what the socioeconomic situations are going on here? What, how's that factoring in?

How is pre existing mental illness factoring into lack of hygiene? That sort of thing. But the study looked at over three thousand adults age sixty or over. Uh, And then they compared their performance in tests of memory and walking speed, and people with none of their own teeth performed approximately temperacent worth in both memory and walking speed tests than

people with their teeth. And they adjusted this for a wide variety of factors, you know, socio demographic characteristics, existing health problems, physical health health behaviors, did they smoke, did they drink, do they have you know, episodes of depression in their life? Applied all of this and they still found a definite gap. So the theory here is that tooth loss could be used as an early marker of mental and physical decline in older age. Now, a two

thousand thirteen study, uh takes things a little, a little further. Uh. This was published in the European Journal of Oral Sciences and it explores sort of the hypothetical effects of tooth

loss here. The research was carried out by the by universities in Norway and Sweden, and they looked at two hundred and seventy three participants with missing teeth aged fifty to eighty, and then they gave them memory tests and they found that the number of teeth in an individual's head quote positively associated with performance on episodic memory recall as well as recognition. Okay, okay, well, I'm trying to

visualize maybe our listeners are doing this too. I'm trying to visualize a biological connection between your teeth in the memory centers and your brain. And I suppose that's part of it. But there's also, you know, sort of the external factors of not having your teeth and the acceleration

of memory loss. Yeah, so a lot of this seems to come down a lot of the theory here seems to come down to the fact that the movement of our jaw and and teeth send sensory input data to the hippocampus, the area of the brain that forms and retrieves memories. So one hypothesis is that, so we have reduced sensory input from those missing teeth that could be damaging our memory. Implants could help, but they're never going

to replace all of those loss sensations. Okay, so this is like a mastication type of thing that like as you chew, your receivering sensory input. Uh okay, it's kind of like you have all these dead phone lines and that could be affecting the phone bank in your in

your head. To put it very simply, Yeah, I wonder well, this is maybe unrelated, but I wonder if there's a connection between ringing ear and and and memory loss as well, because that's sort of a similar fun amenon in which, like the dead phone line analogy is a good one that your brains not receiving the right signals anyway, what's what's the other high second hypothesis is that it could come down more to chewing, so it chewing increases blood flow flow in the brain, and it has been shown

to increase activity in numerous brain areas. Even with dentures. An individual with lost teeth is going to maybe avoid certain foods. They're gonna chew less, so there's gonna be less chewing action and uh, and then that's gonna mean

less blood flow in portions of the brain. Possible. Yeah, my grandmother was recently sick in the hospital and they, I am assuming this must be like a fairly standard practice for hospitals, but they purde everything that she ate, so everything that she received was purade so that she didn't have to chew as much because she was so

weak from the illness that she had had, which was pneumonia. Now, finally, it's also possible that people lacking teeth uh and denture wears that they end up avoiding certain foods, leading to lower intakes of key vitamins, proteins, and just calories in general, which in turn impacts brain performance. Huh. Well, I'm most curious about hypothesis one, and I wonder if there's any connection.

Maybe this is just like where I'm going. But I wrote an episode about ringing your uh for our video series brain Stuff one time, and it's very similar kind of kind of missing sensory signals there. So yeah, I'm curious about that. Now. There have been other studies that have explored correlation between dimple hygiene and various health conditions. There seems to be a connection between gum health and

heart health, between gum disease and dementia. Uh, some even suggesting that gum disease bacteria might get into the brain, causing inflammation and brain damage. Well, that sounds very similar to the heart thing I was talking about, earl. Yeah, and it all comes back to, uh, you know Brendan Burrel's quote about that that sense of impotence in the

face of bodily mysteries. Like, I feel like we we end up coming back in that same place of just being not completely sure how biological factor A influences biological factor B. We're not as far ahead of the curve with our own biology as we like to think that we are. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's fair to say. But so I guess I guess the question is, like, uh, let's say, like we're in a situation where, you know, civilized society has fallen apart and you've got a toothache.

Would you go ahead and just have somebody yank your tooth out and then like use like a hot knife to burn out the any tooth germ that was remaining behind. I mean, the thing about any kind of dental pain is you can you can imagine yourself getting to that point where you say, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna go to this traditional healer, I'm gonna go to this guy down the street. I'm going to try something myself, because when when stuff starts going awry in there, you're

gonna do whatever it takes. You're gonna even further connection between you know, the mouth and the in the brain and the mind and the I I think that there's like a large connection there, because yeah, any kind of tooth pain that I've ever had before, it's just utterly distracting for anything else that's going on. Yeah, and certainly, you know, any kind of dental infect and if it's not treated, if it gets out of control, that can

have dire consequences on your overall health. So it's not just as there's not necessarily a layer of mystery between dental health and overall health. Yeah, So there you have it. Dental extraction, dental modification. We've taken you through a number of different cultures. We've taken you across time here and hopefully landed in a place of curiosity, wonder, and maybe

a little horror. Yeah, so I'm curious out there. You know, maybe you have spent time amongst some of the cultures we're talking about, whether it's the Acadians in Canada, or you're in Uganda or maybe meso America. You've done some archaeological digs in in Mayan cultures before. What experience do you have with this teeth modification that goes on in other societies, or you know, what kind of experience have you had in our own sort of Western you know,

general dentistry. Yeah, and hey, in the meantime, checks out of stuff to blow your mind dot com that's the mothership. That's we'll find all the blog posts, the podcast episodes of the deals links out of those social media accounts we mentioned earlier on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Hey, if people want to get in touch with us the old fashioned way, how can they do that? Well, they can write us on the email and that is blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on

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