Non-surgical removal of teeth : a historical survey / by B.R. Townend.

  • Townend, B. R.
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Non-surgical removal of teeth : a historical survey / by B.R. Townend. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mediaeval times and later. He says that to extract teeth painlessly “ without iron,” fill the cavities with ashes of earthworms. The tooth must first be thoroughly scraped and the gums cut loose about it. “ Therefore use this remedy with confidence, for it has already often been celebrated as a mystery.” Vincent of Beauvais, who lived in the thirteenth century, extols the use of coral for many disorders. He says that decayed teeth are filled with it in order to extract them. Petrus Hispanus (Peter of Spain), who became Pope John XXI, wrote during the thirteenth century an influential and representative book on mediaeval medicine. He advises that a decayed tooth may be easily extracted if it is touched with bitch’s milk, or if the hot root of jusquiam is applied to its roots, but in the latter case one should avoid touching the other teeth as they will fall out also. John of Gaddesden, who practised in Oxford during the first half of the fourteenth century, wrote a curious medical book called “ Rosa Anglica,” in which are found several interesting prescriptions calculated to make the teeth fall out. One of them consists of dried cow’s dung. The excrement of crows, ravens and other birds and beasts was a common remedy of the mediaeval leech for toothache and other disorders. Filth medicines, or as the Germans call them, “ Drekapotheka,” are found in the materia medica of all times and all countries. Their supposed efficacy probably depended upon the idea that disease was caused by an evil spirit entering the body, so the medicine man prescribed nauseous and disgusting drugs which would tend to make the body uninhabitable for the intruding demon. John of Gaddesden also advises to anoint the tooth with the fat of a green frog. He is so convinced of the efficacy of this remedy that he states that if an ox grazing should chew a little frog with the grass its teeth would fall out in an instant! Again we have here an example of an age-old and widespread belief. Frogs appear in a dental recipe in the Assyrian Medical Texts, and it was a common belief in this country and elsewhere within very recent times that if you placed a frog in a child’s mouth which was sore, a cure would be effected. Guy de Chauliac, who was born about 1300, cast some doubt on the efficacy of supposed tooth-eradicating remedies. He says: “The Ancients mention many remedies which draw out the teeth without iron instruments or which make them more easy to draw out, such as the milky juice of the tithymal with pyrethrum, the roots of mulberry and caper, citrine arsenic, aqua fortis, the fat of forest frogs, &c. But these remedies promise much and operate but little [mais tls donnent heaucoup de pvomesses et pen d'‘operations).'' It was many years after his time before this rational view was taken up. We find Giovanni d’Arcoli (Arculanus), who died in 1484, recommending the use of the cautery and application of boiling oil or heated incense to break teeth. In “ A Leech Book of the Fifteenth Century,” (Warren R. Dawson), bird’s dung is again found in the following recipe : — “ For aching of a hollow tooth. Take raven’s dung and put it in a hollow tooth and colour it with the juice of pellitory of Spain so that the sick recognise it not nor know not what it be ; and then put it in the tooth and it shall break the tooth and take away the aching and as some men say it will make the tooth fall out.” The sixteenth century gives us that model of terseness which is quoted by