The Twisted History of Dentistry

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. 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 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

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 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 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, 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, 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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? 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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

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