Toothache

A toothache and impending visit to an endodontist have me thinking things dental this week. With several days out of school thanks to a January snowstorm, I’ve had time to contemplate such questions as, What kind of dental treatment could I have anticipated hundreds or thousands of years ago?

Evidence of dental treatment traces to about 7000 BC. My dentist would have been  a bead maker who
used his bow drill to treat my tooth. Dental assistants came on the scene about the same time, because someone had to hold down the flailing patient during this excruciating procedure.

Moving forward a couple thousand years, my diagnosis would likely have been tooth worms. Indeed, dentists of this era could see these worms when they peered inside the tooth cavity. Sadly, what they took to be worms were actually nerves, and one can only begin to imagine what the patient endured while these “worms” were removed. Remarkably, the diagnosis of tooth worms persisted from 5000 BC until the 1700s.

In Greece, Hippocrates and Aristotle both recorded tooth extraction as a
common dental treatment. This certainly took care of the pain (sometime after the procedure, of course). Extraction continued to be the primary recourse through the middle ages, at which time my dentist would have been a barber. In the 14th century he would likely have used a Dental Pelican, a precursor of modern day forceps.

The roots (pun intended) of modern dentistry track to the 17th century when a French physician, Pierre Fauchard, pioneered a process for dental fillings and discovered that acids from sugar were a cause of tooth decay. Preventive dentistry began to be practiced.

By 1790, I would have been comfortably seated in a specially designed dental chair. (Comfortably seated, not necessarily comfortably treated.) Patients still had no relief from the pain associated with dental procedures, and one imagines that employment prospects for the restraining dental assistant were still very good. The Chinese had tried acupuncture, but the first local anesthetic was not used until 1884 by Carl Koller. Unfortunately cocaine, while highly effective, had the distressing side effect of also being highly addictive. Novocain was introduced by German chemist Alfred Einkorn in 1905.

Nitrous oxide was used as a general anesthesia as early as the 1840s. While the prospect of self-administering this gas has some appeal, it is nonetheless disconcerting.

Thankfully, modern dental treatments are nearly painless and, while I can think of other activities I might prefer, I’m not dreading my upcoming root canal. Now if only something could be done about the associated fiscal pain to my wallet.