Latest / Stuff You Should Know / The Twisted History of Dentistry

Transcript

The Twisted History of Dentistry · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm joh
0:13
Speaker 1: caught and then fun of me this. I'm sorry I
0:19
Speaker 1: had something in my mouth. It is stuff you should know,
0:22
Speaker 1: and I have no room to make fun of you. Friend.
0:24
Speaker 1: I've been on my own dental journey for some time
0:27
Speaker 1: now and I'm still in the midst of it. What
0:30
Speaker 1: are you got going on? All sorts of stuff I
0:33
Speaker 1: was not granted with, like great strong, um, indestructible, like
0:38
Speaker 1: teeth and all that, you know, like the feeling I
0:40
Speaker 1: thought like I just hadn't taken enough care of him whatever.
0:44
Speaker 1: But now that I actually do take really good care
0:46
Speaker 1: of my teeth, I found like, no, it's they're just
0:49
Speaker 1: not as great as they could be. I think, Yeah,
0:52
Speaker 1: I'm I'm fully aware with that emotion, as you know.
0:55
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't even know if I said
0:56
Speaker 1: a may set on the air, but my front went,
0:58
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to have it redone. Yeah, yeah, when
1:00
Speaker 1: is that going to happen? It's sort of I mean,
1:03
Speaker 1: right now, he's basically like, it's not causing any trouble
1:06
Speaker 1: right now, but it's gonna happen at some point, so
1:09
Speaker 1: he almost made it sound like, whenever you feel like
1:12
Speaker 1: you're up for being toothless again for three months, let
1:15
Speaker 1: me know just time, just in time for our next
1:20
Speaker 1: live show whenever that is. Oh jeez, I forgot about that. Um,
1:25
Speaker 1: I don't know, we'll see. Yeah, well, it's not like
1:27
Speaker 1: you haven't been on stage without a tooth before. You're
1:30
Speaker 1: taking them out like that was your stick at at
1:32
Speaker 1: the beginning of a number of shows. So don't get
1:34
Speaker 1: shy these days, Chuck. No, you gotta you gotta work
1:37
Speaker 1: your deficiencies. That's true. So we're talking about the history
1:43
Speaker 1: of dynastry, which, by the way, people listening, I know
1:46
Speaker 1: you know this probably, but it wasn't until like late
1:49
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century that that word was even used. Really,
1:52
Speaker 1: they didn't even call it dynastry until then. They called
1:55
Speaker 1: it fizzle stick. And we should thank quite a few
1:58
Speaker 1: people here. I'm sure you have some uh websites that
2:02
Speaker 1: you looked at, but I went to the British Dental
2:05
Speaker 1: Association art took dot org History Daily, Uh, this great
2:09
Speaker 1: website called all Things Georgian. I think it's a blog
2:13
Speaker 1: where you can find some cool old pictures of antiquated
2:15
Speaker 1: dentistry tools. Uh, and then a book by James Wybrandt
2:20
Speaker 1: called The Excruciating History of Dentistry insert colon sound. Has
2:26
Speaker 1: that been happening, by the way, I don't think so.
2:28
Speaker 1: I think Jerry thought we were joking about that. Literally,
2:31
Speaker 1: I've just been saying that. I'm pretty sure, well I
2:33
Speaker 1: haven't picked it up on any of the QA I've
2:35
Speaker 1: been doing. I haven't either, So we'll find out. I'll
2:38
Speaker 1: pay extra attention UM to some tales and oral oddities
2:42
Speaker 1: from Babylon two braces. Very nice. Yeah, huge, huge shout
2:48
Speaker 1: out also to our boy Dave Ruse for helping us
2:50
Speaker 1: with this one as well. Yeah, this was my idea,
2:54
Speaker 1: and as when we instructed Dave, I said, Hey, Dave,
2:56
Speaker 1: how about history of dentistry? And it's like, I don't
2:59
Speaker 1: want to talk about any thing modern that works. I
3:01
Speaker 1: want to talk about all the old stuff, right, and
3:03
Speaker 1: all the stuff that they tried along the way that
3:06
Speaker 1: people screamed and excruciating pain. And actually that's I think
3:09
Speaker 1: that's that's good for UM for pointing out, Chuck that
3:13
Speaker 1: there are points where what stuff we're talking about like
3:16
Speaker 1: might actually make you feel faint, like it happened to me. Yeah,
3:19
Speaker 1: there's a trigger warning for sure. There was this one
3:21
Speaker 1: site called Science Museum Group Collection Cumbersome, but they have
3:28
Speaker 1: a lot of um dental old dental stuff in their collection,
3:32
Speaker 1: and they have very high rise pictures and a lot
3:35
Speaker 1: of them have descriptions of how the thing was used,
3:37
Speaker 1: and like, I like, i'd like break out in a
3:40
Speaker 1: little trickle sweat along the top of my lip and
3:43
Speaker 1: like get a little woozy just reading about this stuff.
3:46
Speaker 1: And I'm pretty tough with that kind of thing. I mean,
3:48
Speaker 1: I can talk about poop all the live long day,
3:52
Speaker 1: but when it comes to like pulling teeth out without
3:54
Speaker 1: anesthetics and things like that, it's my knees get a
3:57
Speaker 1: little wobbly. Yeah. And I don't know if you had
4:00
Speaker 1: the same reaction, but looking at these ol dental tools,
4:03
Speaker 1: it's it's like, well that was clearly also this you know,
4:08
Speaker 1: like some sort of ironsmithing tool or whatever. And they
4:12
Speaker 1: just said, well, hey, I bet you if you move
4:14
Speaker 1: that little spont dibbot over here, you could also use
4:17
Speaker 1: it to crank out a molar. And as we'll see,
4:20
Speaker 1: if you wanted a tooth remove for a very long time,
4:23
Speaker 1: depending on where you lived, you probably went to go
4:25
Speaker 1: see your local smithie. Yeah, crazy stuff just settle in everybody.
4:29
Speaker 1: Let's start at the very very beginning, because for at
4:32
Speaker 1: least seven thousand years people have been talking and writing
4:38
Speaker 1: about toothaches. The Babylonians, I believe, we're among the first
4:42
Speaker 1: to ever create an alphabet, to ever write anything down.
4:45
Speaker 1: And one of the things they wrote about was toothaches
4:49
Speaker 1: and the idea of where toothaches came from, which are
4:52
Speaker 1: called toothworms chuck, which are cute sounding. Actually you know, yeah,
4:57
Speaker 1: the toothworm is what you I think it is, even
5:01
Speaker 1: though it's not real, but little tiny worms that get
5:03
Speaker 1: in your mouth, and sometimes that they would originate in
5:08
Speaker 1: your mouth like spontaneously. Sometimes they got into your mouth
5:11
Speaker 1: somehow and worm their way literally into your tooth like
5:15
Speaker 1: the the non existent core of an apple. And uh,
5:19
Speaker 1: this is you know. They said, all right, here's what
5:21
Speaker 1: you should do. You should you should uh do some
5:25
Speaker 1: sort of ceremony to the gods and ask for a
5:27
Speaker 1: little help from the gods. And then later on they said, oh,
5:30
Speaker 1: maybe we can actually try something. And that early something
5:34
Speaker 1: and this is two to five zero BC years ago
5:40
Speaker 1: for most people would say, Uh, they would heat up
5:44
Speaker 1: a piece of um. They would heat up bees wax
5:48
Speaker 1: filled with hinbane seeds and put it in your mouth,
5:51
Speaker 1: and so it basically fills your mouth up with the
5:53
Speaker 1: smoke of the hinbane seed, which is a nightshade and
5:56
Speaker 1: it can be really dangerous if there's a lot of it.
5:59
Speaker 1: But this guy, I just showed you where they were at.
6:01
Speaker 1: It seems like all the earliest and for a long
6:05
Speaker 1: time mitigation efforts were trying anything to just numb the
6:09
Speaker 1: pain a little bit for a while, because hem pain
6:11
Speaker 1: will do that in small doses, I'm sure. And it
6:14
Speaker 1: was basically like, let me stop the pain for a
6:15
Speaker 1: little while, but the pain would always come back, so
6:18
Speaker 1: eventually they had to move to extraction. Yes, and that
6:22
Speaker 1: those toothworm The toothworm theory of teeth pain had some
6:27
Speaker 1: really like um staying effect, like it was around in
6:30
Speaker 1: the medieval medieval times in Europe. Uh, if you actually
6:35
Speaker 1: go to medieval times today in your local suburb, you'll
6:38
Speaker 1: hear them talk about toothworms. And there was this No,
6:43
Speaker 1: I don't think so unless somebody really did their homework.
6:45
Speaker 1: But it wouldn't surprise me. No, Um, there was a
6:49
Speaker 1: study I ran across that talked about and this was
6:52
Speaker 1: a paper from talked about a Chinese traditional medicine practitioner
6:56
Speaker 1: who cited toothworms as the cause of somebody's tooth that
7:00
Speaker 1: they were healing and they used that same beeswax, henbane,
7:04
Speaker 1: he um like medicine to treat it. Here's what I
7:09
Speaker 1: want to know. Did they actually see any worms ever? Like,
7:14
Speaker 1: was this somebody whose mouth was so infected they got
7:16
Speaker 1: worms or something? Oh boy, wouldn't that be something. I mean,
7:19
Speaker 1: I don't know if they were completely invisible. It just
7:21
Speaker 1: seems a little weird. Maybe they saw pus and and
7:25
Speaker 1: it came out as in kind of a worm like form,
7:27
Speaker 1: like is it from the gums and somebody thought it
7:30
Speaker 1: was worms or who knows, maybe somebody did have worms.
7:32
Speaker 1: It seems weird to just be like it's worms without
7:35
Speaker 1: anyone ever having seen worms of any kind. I told
7:39
Speaker 1: you guys, I didn't know that you're talking about mouth
7:43
Speaker 1: bus Uh. Let's skip forward to ancient Egypt where we
7:48
Speaker 1: have who maybe the first dentist, and this is around
7:52
Speaker 1: b C or to six zero zero during the time
7:56
Speaker 1: of king Is that dozer? That's what That's how I'd
7:59
Speaker 1: say j is silent, right, uh de hooser a dohoeser. Uh.
8:08
Speaker 1: There was a scribe called Hessy Ree who and they
8:13
Speaker 1: read the hieroglyphics on the scribes burial chamber that basically said,
8:18
Speaker 1: this guy is the best in town dentistry. He was
8:21
Speaker 1: the greatest of those who deal with teeth, uh, and
8:24
Speaker 1: of the physicians. And that was I think one of
8:26
Speaker 1: the first sort of mentions of someone you know, written
8:30
Speaker 1: down on uh, well not paper, but hieroglyphics written down
8:33
Speaker 1: that someone actually did this for a living. Yeah. The
8:35
Speaker 1: paper actually did come not too much longer after that. Um.
8:40
Speaker 1: The Papyrus Ebers, which we've talked about many times, it's
8:43
Speaker 1: a scroll, and it had a lot of stuff medical
8:47
Speaker 1: ailments and treatments for those ailments, and there were treatments
8:51
Speaker 1: for toothaches and um other kinds of like oral problems
8:55
Speaker 1: like bleeding gums and stuff like that. And of course,
8:59
Speaker 1: because what they had a hand at the time where
9:02
Speaker 1: like medicinal cures, they prescribed all sorts of medicinal cures.
9:05
Speaker 1: And it's like you said, there was basically just this
9:09
Speaker 1: aim to cure the pain um, and they would do
9:13
Speaker 1: all sorts of things like use opium, or they would
9:17
Speaker 1: use that henbane or other kinds of night shade. But
9:20
Speaker 1: then also, um, problematically, they would use arsenic, which um
9:25
Speaker 1: is it really does kill disease tissue, sure, but it
9:29
Speaker 1: also can kill you two in some pretty horrific ways. Um.
9:33
Speaker 1: What's crazy about that is not that the ancient Egyptians
9:36
Speaker 1: were using that, you know, like thirty years ago, but
9:40
Speaker 1: that that was still in use into the modern age,
9:44
Speaker 1: Like people were using arsenic for a very long time
9:46
Speaker 1: to treat mouth stuff. Um. And in fact, we've done
9:50
Speaker 1: a lot of weird stuff to our mouth and use
9:52
Speaker 1: a lot of things we shouldn't have been using in
9:54
Speaker 1: our mouths over the years. I was trying to think
9:57
Speaker 1: of a bleeding gums Murphy joke there a minute ago.
9:59
Speaker 1: But all you have to do is say his name
10:01
Speaker 1: and then I guess, uh you you mentioned ancient Chinese
10:06
Speaker 1: medicine or a traditional Chinese medicine, and they were kind
10:10
Speaker 1: of on board early on. It's funny because sometimes people
10:13
Speaker 1: seem to be going toward the right thing because they
10:16
Speaker 1: were using things like rinses and mouth washes. Makes sense
10:21
Speaker 1: they would also use enemas. I'm not sure about that.
10:25
Speaker 1: Enemas have been listed to cure a whole host of things,
10:28
Speaker 1: but I think I don't know about toothaches. It was
10:30
Speaker 1: more for the distraction, is my guess, right, than someone
10:33
Speaker 1: punches you in the mouth. But acupuncture. Of the three
10:38
Speaker 1: acupuncture sites for TCM, twenty six of them are tied
10:43
Speaker 1: to toothache relief. UM. And then piling on from the
10:49
Speaker 1: different cultures that added and contributed to like our general
10:52
Speaker 1: human knowledge of how to treat problems with the mouth. Um.
10:58
Speaker 1: The Hindus from say like India and Southeast Asia and
11:02
Speaker 1: South Asia. UM. They put their stuff down in the Vedas,
11:05
Speaker 1: which were a bunch of ancient texts much like the
11:08
Speaker 1: Papyrus Ebers, which dealt with things like medical conditions, including um,
11:13
Speaker 1: how did not just treat tooth problems in teeth pain
11:17
Speaker 1: but also how to like prevent it. And they actually
11:21
Speaker 1: prescribed using like a twig with the end with the
11:24
Speaker 1: end fraid to um to basically chew on and also
11:28
Speaker 1: just kind of brush with it was like the first
11:30
Speaker 1: earliest toothbrush. And they also had dentrifices, which is a
11:34
Speaker 1: type something you would use to clean or polish or
11:38
Speaker 1: scrape off your teeth. Um made of honey oil and herbs,
11:44
Speaker 1: which is pretty great. Like that was pretty groundbreaking, frankly. Yeah,
11:49
Speaker 1: and that's people still use, uh, I mean in survival
11:53
Speaker 1: handbooks and stuff. They say, if you're you know, lost
11:57
Speaker 1: in the woods for for many many days, you're gonna
12:00
Speaker 1: want to take care of your teeth. It sounds silly,
12:02
Speaker 1: but if you're wandering around for three weeks, uh, you
12:06
Speaker 1: want to just feel fresh. But but the whole twig
12:10
Speaker 1: fraid twig thing is what they still people still do
12:13
Speaker 1: that in different cultures around the world, chewing on twigs.
12:15
Speaker 1: You can even buy some of that stuff still uh
12:19
Speaker 1: here in the West, and uh like dental twigs to
12:22
Speaker 1: chew on and stuff. Yeah, And if you ever have
12:24
Speaker 1: closely watched Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow uses one in
12:28
Speaker 1: that movie that she really she does. I saw it.
12:33
Speaker 1: I don't know if I closely watched it, though, Well,
12:35
Speaker 1: you need to go back and closely watch it. That
12:37
Speaker 1: thing is full of so many um like, so much imagery,
12:41
Speaker 1: so much illuminatut stuff. It's crazy. Really, did you watch
12:46
Speaker 1: it recently? No? For some reason, her chewing on that
12:49
Speaker 1: twig made an enormous impression on me because I haven't
12:51
Speaker 1: seen that movie since the nineties, but I've never forgotten that,
12:55
Speaker 1: And it's not like one of those things where you know,
12:57
Speaker 1: like I only think of it when I'm confronted with
13:01
Speaker 1: Shakespeare and love, like it just pops into my head
13:04
Speaker 1: every once in a while, weirdly, so I was primed
13:07
Speaker 1: for this episode, Chuck. So when you think when I
13:09
Speaker 1: say the words Gwyneth Paltrow, I know you think of
13:12
Speaker 1: two things in this order. Her duet with Huey Lewis
13:16
Speaker 1: that's third cruising? Did you just do that to me?
13:22
Speaker 1: Chewing on twigs? What's what's the third one? Just goop
13:25
Speaker 1: in general? Okay, that's probably just goop. Second, so chewing
13:29
Speaker 1: on the twig goop. And then yes, that duet that
13:33
Speaker 1: I can sometimes push out of my head until you
13:36
Speaker 1: bring it up. Um. So, now we move on to
13:40
Speaker 1: ancient Rome, which is where you know, things sort of
13:44
Speaker 1: took a leap forward in a way, like a lot
13:47
Speaker 1: of stuff did in ancient Rome, not to the kind
13:49
Speaker 1: of modern dental work that we're you know, used to
13:52
Speaker 1: today obviously, but for the time not too bad, and
13:55
Speaker 1: that they did things like crowns, they did bridge work, Uh,
14:00
Speaker 1: had dental prosthetics made from things like ivory or bone,
14:03
Speaker 1: which makes sense. Uh, so they kind of advanced things
14:07
Speaker 1: a little bit. There was a huge bit, if you
14:09
Speaker 1: ask me, yeahs enormous leap forward. Yeah, but I mean
14:14
Speaker 1: I don't I'm sure they look pretty jankie. You know. Well,
14:18
Speaker 1: you could still chew a turkey leg, and by god,
14:20
Speaker 1: you'd be grateful you could. Probably it didn't matter what
14:23
Speaker 1: you looked like in ancient room. Everybody too wasted on wine.
14:26
Speaker 1: Oh I missed my time and place, didn't I you
14:28
Speaker 1: really did. Uh. There was a position, their name all
14:33
Speaker 1: less Cornelius Celsus, who filled supposedly filled the first cavities,
14:38
Speaker 1: but they weren't traditionally like we think of cavities. They
14:42
Speaker 1: were from poard lead, and they were meant to serve
14:46
Speaker 1: as something to grab onto to actually pull a tooth.
14:49
Speaker 1: So I guess he would do it to like some
14:51
Speaker 1: sort of a post or a stem or something. I
14:54
Speaker 1: think he would poor. Yeah, it's weird because you would
14:58
Speaker 1: have to use molten lead, and you can't just go
15:00
Speaker 1: around pouring that on people's teeth and expecting their face
15:03
Speaker 1: to not fall off or develop a nice post. So
15:07
Speaker 1: so yeah, I'm not. I'm not. I get the impression
15:09
Speaker 1: that he molded it around whatever tooth was left so
15:13
Speaker 1: that he had more gripping power on That was my
15:16
Speaker 1: take on it. But but it did end up becoming like, um,
15:21
Speaker 1: I guess at the very least, it's noteworthy that he
15:24
Speaker 1: he kind of came up with the dental fillings, even
15:28
Speaker 1: if that wasn't the point of it. Uh. And then
15:31
Speaker 1: before I guess we break, we should mention this one
15:33
Speaker 1: more kind of fun fact. An ancient room for a
15:38
Speaker 1: for a mouth wash, they recommended rinsing the mouth with
15:41
Speaker 1: the first yurin of the morning, which everyone knows is
15:46
Speaker 1: the densest yellowest urine protein rich. So we are going
15:52
Speaker 1: to break now because I have that taste in my
15:54
Speaker 1: mouth thanks to you, urine. Yeah, I'm very very um suggestible.
16:00
Speaker 1: Have you ever drank your in? No, No, I can
16:04
Speaker 1: say that I never have. I think most people can
16:09
Speaker 1: say one way or the other. Right, Yeah, well, yeah,
16:11
Speaker 1: that's a yes or no question. Yeah, yeah, I'm sort
16:14
Speaker 1: of a little bit. I haven't either. I was just
16:17
Speaker 1: I was just wondering, you never know. Yeah, well, it's
16:19
Speaker 1: good that after thirteen years we're still exploring one another.
16:23
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's take a break and we'll be
16:25
Speaker 1: back right after this. So Chuck, we're back, and we're
16:48
Speaker 1: into the Middle Ages. Now. I don't know if anyone's
16:51
Speaker 1: caught onto this, but we're loosely organizing this. Um yeah,
16:56
Speaker 1: over the over the years, okay, and we've reached the
16:59
Speaker 1: Middle Age Middle Ages of Europe, I should say specifically,
17:02
Speaker 1: um and after Rome fell in so many ways. And
17:08
Speaker 1: of course we've talked about it before, but the Middle
17:10
Speaker 1: Ages are often called the Dark Ages. You're not even
17:12
Speaker 1: supposed to call them the Middle Ages because it makes
17:14
Speaker 1: the stuff that happened during this time inconsequential and it's
17:17
Speaker 1: just not the case. But it is true that, like
17:20
Speaker 1: the practice of dentistry really took a nose dive during
17:25
Speaker 1: this time. So this is actually a pretty good example
17:27
Speaker 1: of how human knowledge in um, well, the human knowledge
17:32
Speaker 1: of how to do things smartly really fell off for
17:35
Speaker 1: a little while had to be rediscovered, that's right. And
17:39
Speaker 1: it was around this time that physicians like they were
17:43
Speaker 1: something special back then. But the physician said, I'm not
17:46
Speaker 1: messing around with teeth, like the mouth is beneath me.
17:49
Speaker 1: Which is funny that that's still sort of a thing, right, Yeah,
17:52
Speaker 1: it's true as far as like, uh, what movie was
17:56
Speaker 1: that the The Hangover when Ed Helms was a dentist
17:59
Speaker 1: and none of the doctors like them any respect, wasn't it? Um?
18:02
Speaker 1: Wasn't it on Seinfeld that George pretended to be a
18:06
Speaker 1: dentist for a little while? Was it? He pretended to
18:09
Speaker 1: be an architect? Right? But there was something about a
18:12
Speaker 1: dentist there. It was going to be like a dentist
18:14
Speaker 1: at first. Maybe I don't know. Well there was the
18:17
Speaker 1: dentist too, which was what's his face? Kranston, Tim Whatley,
18:21
Speaker 1: Tim Whatley, I don't know. It's I don't know. Okay,
18:26
Speaker 1: well there's something to pretend to be a dentist. Maybe
18:28
Speaker 1: the kid double cross the kid that George was sponsoring
18:32
Speaker 1: for the the Susan's Foundation was said he wanted to
18:37
Speaker 1: be an architect, and then when he takes him in
18:39
Speaker 1: there for the scholarship, he changes, he double crosses him
18:41
Speaker 1: and says he wants to be a dentist, and everybody
18:44
Speaker 1: laughed about how stupid architects are, even though Georgia an architect.
18:49
Speaker 1: I think we may have hammered it out here live
18:52
Speaker 1: on the episode. So if physicians did not pull teeth.
18:56
Speaker 1: That was left to a couple of other people professions.
19:01
Speaker 1: One was called a tooth drawer, uh, not a tooth drawer.
19:06
Speaker 1: And the first reference I found that this was Peter
19:09
Speaker 1: of London in thirteen twenty. Okay, you're a better researcher
19:12
Speaker 1: than I am. That's not true, but it is Chuck,
19:15
Speaker 1: at least in this case, it is very true because
19:18
Speaker 1: I tried. I looked high and low and did not
19:20
Speaker 1: turn that up to find them. Two drawers drawers from
19:22
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages. Well, I think they started in the
19:26
Speaker 1: thirteen hundreds, but I do think you're right in that
19:28
Speaker 1: they had their sort of apex probably in like the
19:31
Speaker 1: seventeen and eighteen hundreds, because and we'll explain what they are.
19:36
Speaker 1: They are exactly the character that uh what's his face
19:41
Speaker 1: played in Christoph Waltz in Django unchained. Yes, when he
19:46
Speaker 1: played the dentist, he now he would have been he
19:50
Speaker 1: was kind of like a tooth drawer. No, he definitely was.
19:52
Speaker 1: He was. He was an itinerant dentist for sure. Um
19:56
Speaker 1: And yes, he he was like a more tooth drawer
19:58
Speaker 1: than what you would consider a dentist in today's standards.
20:02
Speaker 1: But I also have the impression that tooth drawers were
20:05
Speaker 1: way more like showman like, um, much less scrupulous and
20:10
Speaker 1: and like refined, and they were just kind of like
20:13
Speaker 1: well like Charlotte Charlottean's and actually the word Charlatan is
20:17
Speaker 1: the Italian for tooth drawer. Yeah, I thought that that's
20:21
Speaker 1: who that character was, though we just didn't get to
20:24
Speaker 1: see him practice that much. I see, I see, okay,
20:28
Speaker 1: because he wasn't doing dentistry in the movie, but he
20:30
Speaker 1: rolled through with that you know, big old tooth on
20:33
Speaker 1: the spring of his buggy, which is pretty fun. But
20:37
Speaker 1: I'm sure at the very least Tarantino, you know, sort
20:39
Speaker 1: of based it on this practice, which was they would
20:43
Speaker 1: come into town. They were sort of part entertainer, part um,
20:47
Speaker 1: not even part dentist, because what they really were were
20:50
Speaker 1: just people with enough uh verve to take pliers and
20:56
Speaker 1: yanka tooth out of somebody's mouth. Yeah, and they on
20:59
Speaker 1: a stage, yes, on a stage, and they would be
21:02
Speaker 1: surrounded by a band maybe depending on um, you know
21:06
Speaker 1: what errow we're talking about, they would uh might they
21:09
Speaker 1: might have jugglers and acrobats like they basically like surrounded
21:15
Speaker 1: themselves with a circus and the main attraction, the main
21:18
Speaker 1: event was the pulling of teeth, and it would just
21:21
Speaker 1: be like one after the other, come on up here.
21:24
Speaker 1: And that was a lot of times your only option,
21:27
Speaker 1: depending on where you lived, was to wait around for
21:29
Speaker 1: the tooth drawer to come along and hopefully pull your teeth,
21:33
Speaker 1: or again, like we talked about before, you might have
21:36
Speaker 1: somebody in town who was a blacksmith or a goldsmith
21:41
Speaker 1: um who would be willing to pull teeth and maybe
21:43
Speaker 1: even made like some sort of primitive dental appliances to
21:46
Speaker 1: to replace the pulled tooth what with, So you would
21:49
Speaker 1: go see him, they pull the tooth and then they
21:51
Speaker 1: put like a I don't know, an iron tooth in
21:54
Speaker 1: in its place or something like that. But that was
21:56
Speaker 1: your options for a very long time. Yeah, and I
21:59
Speaker 1: think the tooth drawer that you know, the purpose of
22:01
Speaker 1: the band was to distract people from the pain, the
22:05
Speaker 1: howling pain. So the band would they would literally tap
22:08
Speaker 1: on the stage louder for the band to play louder
22:11
Speaker 1: when it got more intense, and they would, you know,
22:13
Speaker 1: they would dope them up with like liquor or something,
22:16
Speaker 1: and part of it was to like pull teeth but
22:19
Speaker 1: not like, hey, I want to pull fifty teeth in
22:20
Speaker 1: this sound to make money. I think it was like
22:22
Speaker 1: fifty cents of tooth. It was mainly, I think, to
22:25
Speaker 1: sell the tonics and the salves and all that snake
22:28
Speaker 1: oil stuff that came along with it as well. Yeah
22:30
Speaker 1: that's where they get you. That's totally where they get you.
22:33
Speaker 1: Still where they get you. Yeah, so so okay, So
22:36
Speaker 1: tooth drawers were medieval, but that's really impressive that they
22:40
Speaker 1: lasted until the eighteenth century. They were They were around
22:44
Speaker 1: for a really long time. One of the problems was
22:47
Speaker 1: that not only were they Charlatan's like one of their techniques.
22:51
Speaker 1: When they came into town, the first person they would
22:54
Speaker 1: call on was like a plant who was working with
22:56
Speaker 1: them and would come up with like a tooth in
22:58
Speaker 1: their mouth already, and the dentists would pretend to just
23:01
Speaker 1: painlessly pull it, and they'd spit this tooth out and
23:03
Speaker 1: there you go. And then all of a sudden, everybody
23:05
Speaker 1: who actually did have tooth paint would be willing to
23:08
Speaker 1: come up on stage. They were hucksters. There were from
23:10
Speaker 1: what I saw, actual like legit ones who cared about
23:13
Speaker 1: people and wanted to ease suffering that Christoph Waltz is
23:17
Speaker 1: of the tooth drars, but there were plenty. For the
23:21
Speaker 1: most part, they were generally viewed as carneys, like you
23:24
Speaker 1: didn't you didn't you know, you didn't like talk openly
23:27
Speaker 1: about how much money you had in your wallet around
23:29
Speaker 1: him kind of thing. Right, Um, And you know, at
23:33
Speaker 1: the beginning of this section we mentioned that there were
23:34
Speaker 1: a couple of types of people would do it because
23:37
Speaker 1: physicians wouldn't. The tooth roar was one, and then the
23:40
Speaker 1: barber surgeon was the other. If you've ever seen the
23:44
Speaker 1: great Saturday Night Live skit from years ago with Steve
23:47
Speaker 1: Martin as Theodoric of York, one of the great all
23:51
Speaker 1: time skits, I don't think i've seen that one. He
23:53
Speaker 1: was a barber and as you know, of course, everything
23:56
Speaker 1: that comes in there, and he's like, you just need
23:57
Speaker 1: a good bleeding, Like Bill Murray came men with both
24:00
Speaker 1: of his legs broken off and just blood everywhere, and
24:03
Speaker 1: he's like, you need a bleeding. He's like, I'm already bleeding. Uh.
24:07
Speaker 1: It's good stuff. But um. Barbering was first introduced in
24:11
Speaker 1: Rome and about two nineties six, and they think that
24:15
Speaker 1: they got into dentistry some because they already had the tools,
24:19
Speaker 1: like sharp things basically. Uh. And eventually they would split.
24:23
Speaker 1: Barber surgeons would split up in seventy. But before that
24:27
Speaker 1: they were literally barbers and surgeons. They would cut hair
24:31
Speaker 1: and stuff and also cut you open if they needed to. Yeah.
24:35
Speaker 1: But when they split off, it's not like the barber
24:37
Speaker 1: surgeons stopped cutting you open. They would still do limb amputations.
24:43
Speaker 1: They would do bleedings like blood lighting with leeches. They
24:46
Speaker 1: would do um, tooth pulling, um. And they would also
24:49
Speaker 1: shave you and give you a haircut. It was like
24:52
Speaker 1: the other stuff that the medical surgeons who went to
24:55
Speaker 1: the universities, the earlier universities for training, um, that's what
25:00
Speaker 1: they kind of kept as their own. They became the
25:02
Speaker 1: physicians where the barber surgeons were, you know, doing like
25:06
Speaker 1: stuff anybody could do, you know, like amputating a limb. Right,
25:10
Speaker 1: And the theodoric of York Bit is appropriate here because
25:14
Speaker 1: that's sort of what you know, the whole blood letting
25:16
Speaker 1: and bleeding thing was they were. They would bleed people
25:20
Speaker 1: for all kinds of things, including tooth pain. Um. They
25:23
Speaker 1: would say, you know, I think all the way up
25:25
Speaker 1: until like the first half of the eight hundreds. If
25:29
Speaker 1: you had a cavity or something, they would bleed you first,
25:32
Speaker 1: like first thing. It was just a matter of course. Yeah,
25:35
Speaker 1: And Dave turned up UM. As late as nineteen seventeen,
25:39
Speaker 1: a guy named Charles Edmund Kells, who was respected for
25:42
Speaker 1: dentistry UM wrote a treatise on how to um put
25:47
Speaker 1: how to direct leeches to a specific spot on the gums,
25:50
Speaker 1: to that part of the gums. And I looked into
25:54
Speaker 1: my great astonishment, Chuck, we have not done an episode
25:57
Speaker 1: on leeches, and by god, we are going to do
25:59
Speaker 1: an episode. Really. I know. We didn't want to medical leeches, right,
26:03
Speaker 1: we did a bizarre medical treatments episode and that was
26:07
Speaker 1: in there, and it was in there, but I mean
26:09
Speaker 1: it's perfect. It's like weird medical stuff animal episode. It's
26:14
Speaker 1: got it all. It's yeah to the movie leeches. Gotta
26:19
Speaker 1: talk about stand by me? Oh yeah, yeah, that movie,
26:22
Speaker 1: but also leeches too. Was there a movie called Leeches?
26:24
Speaker 1: I'm sure there was. And I think I had an
26:26
Speaker 1: exclamation exclamation point. Well, I'll tell you what. If there's
26:29
Speaker 1: not that movie, we'll do that movie too, Okay, like
26:33
Speaker 1: we'll make it ourselves. Yeah, starring us, written directed by us.
26:36
Speaker 1: The whole deal. This sounds awesome. We could we could
26:39
Speaker 1: just go back and use our This Day in History
26:41
Speaker 1: series and just dub in new dialogue and call it
26:44
Speaker 1: as right. Um. So the tools that they would use,
26:49
Speaker 1: this is where I went to that Georgian All Things
26:50
Speaker 1: Georgian website. There were all kinds of things. It was
26:53
Speaker 1: something called a dental pelican. All these were sort of
26:57
Speaker 1: versions of forceps. At the end of the day. Uh,
27:00
Speaker 1: the pelican looks I was sort of like ice tongs,
27:03
Speaker 1: like for big blocks of ice. I couldn't make heads
27:06
Speaker 1: or tails of how it used. I don't know. I
27:08
Speaker 1: mean there's something called a dental key, which um could
27:12
Speaker 1: be used to either lever out your tooth or just
27:15
Speaker 1: break it into pieces. That was the one that made
27:17
Speaker 1: me feel first faint. So George the Third's operator for
27:21
Speaker 1: the teeth, Thomas Bird Moore, uh wrote some stuff in
27:26
Speaker 1: his Tristas on the disorders and Deformities of the teeth
27:29
Speaker 1: and gums in seventeen seventy and he talked about this
27:31
Speaker 1: lady that came in that had, you know, had a
27:34
Speaker 1: bad tooth that needed to be pulled. One of our
27:35
Speaker 1: upper molars and he said that after some work, he
27:39
Speaker 1: brought away the affected tooth together with a piece of
27:43
Speaker 1: jawbone as big as a walnut and three neighboring molars. Lord. Yeah,
27:46
Speaker 1: so that was I'm glad you said that. I ran
27:49
Speaker 1: into that all over the place. One of the problems
27:51
Speaker 1: with pre trained dentistry, um, where there was like actual
27:57
Speaker 1: like science based treatments and stuff like that when you
28:02
Speaker 1: had your tooth pulled, like there was a really good
28:05
Speaker 1: chance that a chunk of the bone and like your
28:09
Speaker 1: your jaw was going to come out along with it
28:11
Speaker 1: because they didn't know what they were doing, and um,
28:14
Speaker 1: like do you could die from it? Like a lot
28:16
Speaker 1: of people actually died from an infection that was brought
28:20
Speaker 1: on by a badly pulled tooth, a botched tooth tooth drawing. Yeah,
28:24
Speaker 1: this is um. I mean, it's sad, but it's kind
28:26
Speaker 1: of funny too because it was so long ago. But
28:29
Speaker 1: the Bill of mortality in London in sixteen, Uh what
28:33
Speaker 1: the number five cause of death on the bill of mortality?
28:36
Speaker 1: It was just teeth, That's all you need to say.
28:40
Speaker 1: That's it. They were apparently a hundred and eleven people
28:44
Speaker 1: in London died from infections in one week, um, brought
28:48
Speaker 1: on by botch dental dental pullings. Again, we don't mean
28:53
Speaker 1: to be laughing, but uh, comedy is tragedy perfect plus time. Right. Yeah,
28:57
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you mean. I've got one that's
28:59
Speaker 1: coming up that I just can't help. Okay, So we
29:03
Speaker 1: finally have reached that eighteenth century where that's interestingly, that's
29:08
Speaker 1: the heyday of the tooth drawers that we described, like
29:11
Speaker 1: where they roll into town with like a circus around
29:14
Speaker 1: him and everything. The early eighteenth century was when they
29:18
Speaker 1: were really doing that up. Um. But at the same time,
29:21
Speaker 1: this is also the origin of dentistry as we understand
29:25
Speaker 1: it today, like modern dentistry. And there are two guys
29:28
Speaker 1: that are typically pointed to as the um the fathers
29:32
Speaker 1: of dentistry. One is a Frenchman named Pierre Fauchard, Yeah,
29:38
Speaker 1: and the other is that an American named green Vardamin Black,
29:42
Speaker 1: which is a pretty cool name. G BB. Yeah, two
29:47
Speaker 1: colors in your name, that is impressive. You don't see
29:50
Speaker 1: that very often. Like his name is Green Black, Yeah,
29:54
Speaker 1: I never thought about that. Well, you just heard his
29:57
Speaker 1: name recently. You know what you get when you mixed
29:59
Speaker 1: green and black, like black I think black, right, Yeah,
30:03
Speaker 1: so you could just call him black. So Pierre Fourchard
30:07
Speaker 1: he uh. He pioneered a lot of things. But one
30:10
Speaker 1: of the funny things that you never really think about
30:12
Speaker 1: as far as an advancement was literally just putting people
30:14
Speaker 1: in an armchair to work on them. Apparently before then
30:19
Speaker 1: they would lay people on the floor and I guess
30:22
Speaker 1: get on their knees. The dentist would and put their
30:25
Speaker 1: head between their knees and like hold it between their
30:28
Speaker 1: knees and thighs to keep it steady because it was
30:31
Speaker 1: such an awful thing. Yes, I mean that that was dentistry. Yeah,
30:35
Speaker 1: so it really was like cutting edge to be like,
30:38
Speaker 1: how about you just make yourself comfortable in this chair
30:40
Speaker 1: and I'll stand under you instead and me comfortable, right. Um.
30:43
Speaker 1: And that wasn't the extent of Fouchard's contributions. He was
30:46
Speaker 1: the first to to create like evidence based treatments. Um,
30:51
Speaker 1: he didn't. He just kind of pooh pooed the idea
30:54
Speaker 1: of just following tradition. He felt tradition was probably not
30:58
Speaker 1: so great and he wanted to do a apply science
31:00
Speaker 1: and and um ration rationalism, I guess to the to
31:04
Speaker 1: the whole pursuit of treating people's teeth problems. Um. He
31:08
Speaker 1: also got really good at um creating um like prosthetics
31:14
Speaker 1: like dentures and things like that that he would string together. Um.
31:19
Speaker 1: He also was um known for introducing a lot of
31:23
Speaker 1: the dental tools. I don't know if he invented all
31:25
Speaker 1: of them, but he he organized and categorized him and
31:28
Speaker 1: basically his treatise, I think it was a two volume
31:31
Speaker 1: work that spanned eight hundred pages, basically set down like
31:35
Speaker 1: here's how you be like a legitimate dentist, seventeen fifties style.
31:40
Speaker 1: And a lot of his his observations were so um
31:44
Speaker 1: they were just accurate that they still hold hold true today.
31:47
Speaker 1: Although I've seen his his work as being described as primitive,
31:50
Speaker 1: but he was. That's what pioneers do, They produced accurate
31:55
Speaker 1: primitive work. What about green Black? Was he basically in
31:59
Speaker 1: the same out. I didn't see a lot about him.
32:02
Speaker 1: I didn't do a lot of research on green Black.
32:04
Speaker 1: I just saw that both of them tend to be
32:07
Speaker 1: tied together as they kind of split that um that
32:12
Speaker 1: that name is the father. Yeah. I saw much more
32:15
Speaker 1: on Fochard. Uh should we take a break now, all right?
32:20
Speaker 1: We'll take a break and we'll talk about anesthetics and toothbrushes, toothpaste,
32:26
Speaker 1: all that good stuff right after this. So, now, Chuck,
32:49
Speaker 1: we finally reached the point where dentistry doesn't have to
32:52
Speaker 1: be the worst thing that ever happened to you in
32:55
Speaker 1: your entire life? Then why is it the worst thing
32:58
Speaker 1: that happens to me? Be as you're failing to imagine
33:01
Speaker 1: how bad it could be? All right, I got you. Well,
33:04
Speaker 1: like we should thank our lucky stars that we were
33:07
Speaker 1: born into an era where there's such a thing as
33:09
Speaker 1: an anesthetics. Yeah, I mean they did their best back
33:12
Speaker 1: in the day. Like we mentioned earlier, they were using plants,
33:15
Speaker 1: they're using night shades, they're using opium, hashish, uh, kind
33:20
Speaker 1: of whatever they could get their hands on to make
33:21
Speaker 1: people feel a little better while you're doing this horrific
33:24
Speaker 1: stuff party at the dentist's office. That's right, Uh, you
33:28
Speaker 1: would use That's still the best part of when I
33:30
Speaker 1: get my implants. You know that like twelve seconds of
33:33
Speaker 1: bliss of what do you get? Do they give you
33:36
Speaker 1: nitrous twilight sleep? Okay, wow, that's good stuff. Huh And
33:42
Speaker 1: with that huh, yeah, you get the I V and
33:44
Speaker 1: about eight seconds of you know, the best part of
33:47
Speaker 1: your week, and then you wake up in your mouth
33:50
Speaker 1: is a little sore, like when you're when you're counting backwards.
33:53
Speaker 1: You're like, oh man, they know I'm totally wasted. I know,
33:57
Speaker 1: and they're making fun of me. Uh so sleep Sponges
34:01
Speaker 1: was another thing they used. They would soak sponges in
34:05
Speaker 1: him luck again, opium, man drake whatever they had, and
34:08
Speaker 1: then dry it out in the sun and then it
34:10
Speaker 1: was just kind of there at your disposal, and when
34:12
Speaker 1: you wanted to use it, you would just activate it
34:14
Speaker 1: by dipping it in some water, put under their nostrils
34:17
Speaker 1: and there you go, goodbye, good night. Um. I also
34:23
Speaker 1: didn't know this, and apparently a lot of people don't,
34:24
Speaker 1: because I saw it mentioned here there, but nobody seemed
34:27
Speaker 1: to have much detail about it. But ether Um, which
34:31
Speaker 1: I squarely placed in the nineteenth century, as far as
34:34
Speaker 1: anti sex go, was usually known to humans from the
34:38
Speaker 1: twelve hundreds. I didn't know that. Yeah, there was an
34:41
Speaker 1: alchemist named Raymond Lollis or Raman Lowly. He was Spanish,
34:45
Speaker 1: but he was an alchemist, and he somehow stumbled onto
34:47
Speaker 1: ether I could not get the details, but he saw that, like, oh,
34:51
Speaker 1: this is really good at painkilling. He called it sweet vitriol.
34:55
Speaker 1: But um, apparently it was just lost. The knowledge was
34:59
Speaker 1: lost to Stree for about five six years, which is
35:03
Speaker 1: that's an example of why the Middle Ages or that
35:05
Speaker 1: shouldn't be called the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages,
35:08
Speaker 1: like that was a discovery. It's just that at the
35:11
Speaker 1: time everybody was too stupid to spread that information. I guess, right. Uh.
35:16
Speaker 1: And then finally in the seventeen seventies we come upon
35:21
Speaker 1: one of the greatest discoveries, nitrous oxide, which is so
35:25
Speaker 1: great we did a whole episode on it, so we
35:28
Speaker 1: don't really need to go over all of this again.
35:30
Speaker 1: But one of the things I don't even know if
35:32
Speaker 1: we mentioned back then, because I feel like I would
35:35
Speaker 1: have remembered this. But one of the young scientists early
35:38
Speaker 1: on who was practicing with it, named Humphrey Davy, uh,
35:42
Speaker 1: would put it in a sack to huff and he
35:44
Speaker 1: called them paradise bags. What a great name. I think
35:50
Speaker 1: I remember saying that. Well, there were you know, the
35:53
Speaker 1: long and short of nitris is it sort of came
35:55
Speaker 1: and went over the years with various successful demonstrations in
35:59
Speaker 1: front of groups of doctors in Dennis, so I'm not
36:02
Speaker 1: so successful in front of big groups, and so it
36:04
Speaker 1: kind of ebbed and flowed in popularity as a result. Yeah,
36:07
Speaker 1: Horace Wells um famously botched the demonstration that set um
36:12
Speaker 1: nitrous oxide back a good twenty years basically, but a
36:17
Speaker 1: couple of years after that, one of his students, UM W. T. G. Morton, said, Hey, everybody,
36:23
Speaker 1: you thought nitrous oxide was something, check out ether And
36:28
Speaker 1: he introduced ether um through a demonstration and showed how
36:33
Speaker 1: somebody could have a tumor removed without even batting an eyelash,
36:36
Speaker 1: and everybody was like, Okay, this ether is pretty good.
36:40
Speaker 1: So either ether sotoaked rags were a UM for a
36:43
Speaker 1: very long time and anesthetic used in surgery but also
36:46
Speaker 1: dentistry too. And then laughing gas kind of UM came
36:50
Speaker 1: back about like twenty years after wells is botched demonstration.
36:55
Speaker 1: So by the late nineteenth century, the mid late nineteenth century,
37:00
Speaker 1: UM we had two very powerful anesthetics that just completely
37:04
Speaker 1: changed the course of dentistry and I think allowed people
37:08
Speaker 1: to start being like, Okay, I'll I'm willing to start
37:12
Speaker 1: like actually going to see a dentist now if they've
37:15
Speaker 1: got this stuff to offer, right, and so they said,
37:18
Speaker 1: you know it would be even better is if we
37:20
Speaker 1: gave them cocaine. Uh. And there was a dentist, an
37:24
Speaker 1: American named William Stewart Halstead, who was the first person.
37:28
Speaker 1: I guess you know, they noticed, hey, when we're when
37:31
Speaker 1: we're taking this stuff and we put it in our mouth,
37:33
Speaker 1: it makes our mouth numb. So maybe we can use
37:35
Speaker 1: it for dentistry. Right, and so somebody this in the bathroom,
37:40
Speaker 1: that's right, and they're like, oh god, this's got such
37:42
Speaker 1: a bore. Uh, they injected He was the first one
37:45
Speaker 1: to inject it into the patient's gum and jaw for
37:48
Speaker 1: pain relief. And so that, you know, following that forward,
37:51
Speaker 1: there were a lot of cocaine based toothache remedies. Obviously, Um,
37:56
Speaker 1: you know, cocaine had the dark side, so uh, they
38:00
Speaker 1: placed it with new cocaine or no vocane and some
38:04
Speaker 1: other you know, non addictive pain relievers. But for a
38:07
Speaker 1: while there, cocaine was certainly used in dentistry. Yeah. Apparently
38:11
Speaker 1: Halsted said that he lost three assistance to cocaine addiction.
38:16
Speaker 1: And Dave puts like they actually died and I was
38:19
Speaker 1: just thinking, like I can just imagine Halstead like hearing
38:23
Speaker 1: like a thump in the other room and just being
38:25
Speaker 1: like another one. Can you just imagine like losing three
38:30
Speaker 1: of your assistance to overdose deaths from cocaine, shooting up
38:34
Speaker 1: cocaine and and like you're just trying to do your
38:36
Speaker 1: dentistry practice. And then he threw him in his convertible
38:39
Speaker 1: and drove him over to Eric Stoltz's house, right, and
38:43
Speaker 1: it all worked out. Man. We got pop culture flying
38:47
Speaker 1: all over the place today too. Uh So, now we're
38:50
Speaker 1: at toothbrushes and toothpaste sort of a little more in
38:53
Speaker 1: earnest in that they you know, we kind of talked
38:56
Speaker 1: about the ancient stuff that they would use these tree
38:58
Speaker 1: um uh wigs and stuff like that. Gwyneth Paltrow, Yeah,
39:02
Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow. Um, they they would use cloth. I think
39:06
Speaker 1: the Queen of England use cloth and toothpicks until the
39:10
Speaker 1: mid nineteenth century. Basically any kind of um manufacturing process
39:14
Speaker 1: kind of didn't make it affordable to even make regular toothbrushes,
39:17
Speaker 1: so it's cloth and sponge and rinses and stuff like that.
39:22
Speaker 1: But I think they eventually worked out the toothbrush and
39:25
Speaker 1: they needed something to put on the toothbrush, at which
39:29
Speaker 1: point they said, how about just some really strong uh
39:34
Speaker 1: scrubbing what's the word I'm looking for? Bubbles? No, like,
39:38
Speaker 1: what's the power? Like an abrace of powder, and they
39:42
Speaker 1: use stuff like crushed coral and pumice, but that would
39:44
Speaker 1: ruin your teeth after a few weeks really quickly, and
39:48
Speaker 1: so um toothpaste came along, and it's still followed that
39:52
Speaker 1: same pattern where apparently the earliest incarnations of pepsodent had
39:58
Speaker 1: um something that was it was an abrasive that you
40:01
Speaker 1: could actually cut glass with. And there was another one,
40:05
Speaker 1: another toothpaste called tartar Off, that had hydrochloric acid in it.
40:09
Speaker 1: Tartar Off for sure, I mean it would make your
40:12
Speaker 1: teeth white, for sure, but then it would eventually wear
40:14
Speaker 1: them down to nubs in like a few months. You know. Yeah,
40:17
Speaker 1: I think it took a while to kind of um
40:20
Speaker 1: find the right balance between protecting the teeth and cleaning
40:23
Speaker 1: the teeth at the same time. Yeah, And I mean
40:25
Speaker 1: there's still abrasives in your toothpaste today. They've just gotten
40:27
Speaker 1: a lot better at getting it just the right amount
40:30
Speaker 1: so that, yeah, it doesn't wear your enamel down baking
40:32
Speaker 1: soda and stuff like that, right, yeah, And I ran
40:35
Speaker 1: across something and I think the A d A website.
40:37
Speaker 1: Um that in America, toothpaste and brushing your teeth in
40:43
Speaker 1: general did not become widespread. It wasn't like the norm
40:47
Speaker 1: until after World War Two. And it was because American
40:50
Speaker 1: g i's returned from Europe saying, hey, it's crazy. Everybody
40:55
Speaker 1: over in Europe has like actually like nice breath and
40:58
Speaker 1: this is how they do it. And that's when it
41:00
Speaker 1: really took off from what I and yeah, very cool,
41:03
Speaker 1: Yeah it is. It is cool in a way, but
41:06
Speaker 1: also like wow in another way, like these are my
41:08
Speaker 1: grandparents were talking about. Right, Uh, the greatest generation, that's right,
41:13
Speaker 1: the greatest generation. Uh. We can dispel the myth that
41:18
Speaker 1: George Washington had wooden teeth. Uh, he had terrible teeth
41:22
Speaker 1: and he had a really bad time with his teeth. Uh.
41:25
Speaker 1: So he did have fake teeth, but they were I
41:27
Speaker 1: think the bases were made from ivory and tusk and
41:30
Speaker 1: stuff like that, but the human the teeth were actually
41:34
Speaker 1: human teeth. They were from We talked about grave robbing
41:37
Speaker 1: in the live episode that we did. They would grave
41:40
Speaker 1: rob for teeth. Good teeth. They would people poor people
41:43
Speaker 1: that had decent teeth would sell their teeth for money.
41:46
Speaker 1: They actually documented that he paid his slaves for teeth, which,
41:50
Speaker 1: on the one hand, you're like, oh, that's pretty cool
41:51
Speaker 1: he actually paid his slaves rather than said, go bring
41:54
Speaker 1: me some of my slaves teeth. But at the same time,
41:57
Speaker 1: I was reading about it and they were like, it
41:59
Speaker 1: doesn't matter really what he paid him, unless it was
42:00
Speaker 1: just some eye popping amount. It's still like it's an
42:04
Speaker 1: inherently inequitable transaction. But um, I do feel bad for
42:10
Speaker 1: George Washington in that. Um he he apparently kind of
42:15
Speaker 1: suffered with his teeth. Like, there's nobody, especially in America,
42:18
Speaker 1: whose teeth have ever been talked about and written about
42:21
Speaker 1: more than George Washington. You are a close second, but
42:25
Speaker 1: he's definitely the first, first place winner. And um he
42:29
Speaker 1: apparently one of the reasons why he wore dentures and
42:33
Speaker 1: like kind of suffered through this and and and insisted
42:36
Speaker 1: on wearing them all the time was because his he
42:40
Speaker 1: was the face of this new nation. He was the
42:43
Speaker 1: first president, right and at the time it was it
42:47
Speaker 1: was um his vitality, his health, his strength was basically
42:52
Speaker 1: the same as the nation's health and strength, and so
42:56
Speaker 1: for him to show any kind of weakness or problem
42:58
Speaker 1: or disease or anything like that would make people wonder like, oh,
43:02
Speaker 1: does that also mean that this new American experiment is
43:05
Speaker 1: also diseased and problem as problems And so in a
43:08
Speaker 1: way like he really kind of carried this burden for
43:11
Speaker 1: the country, for the image of the country. But um, yeah,
43:15
Speaker 1: his teeth are he had like no teeth by the
43:18
Speaker 1: time he was fifty one. They all fell out, and
43:19
Speaker 1: they started falling out when he was in his early twenties.
43:24
Speaker 1: I was talking to you because I was like, we've
43:26
Speaker 1: seen his teeth, and I thought we both actually thought
43:30
Speaker 1: that maybe we saw it at the the Memorial Masonic
43:34
Speaker 1: Temple and in Old Town Alexandria. But I don't think
43:38
Speaker 1: they're there. So we think we saw him in Mountain
43:40
Speaker 1: Vernon because supposedly that's where they are. But both of
43:42
Speaker 1: us remember seeing them at that Masonic Temple. I've been
43:46
Speaker 1: to Mount Vernon a couple of times. I don't remember
43:48
Speaker 1: seeing his teeth, So I wonder if we did see
43:51
Speaker 1: his teeth at the Masonic Temple and they moved into
43:53
Speaker 1: Mountain Vernon and now I'm looking on the internet. It's like, no,
43:56
Speaker 1: they're at Mountain Vernon. Silly. Maybe it was a museum
43:59
Speaker 1: of sex. They had George Washington's chattering teeth. So now
44:05
Speaker 1: we move on to X rays, which were discovered in
44:10
Speaker 1: by German scientists. They started using those on the mouth
44:13
Speaker 1: pretty quickly, but a thing kind of popped up early
44:17
Speaker 1: on that it ended up being bad and that they
44:19
Speaker 1: didn't really know how to read X rays that well,
44:23
Speaker 1: at least probably everywhere at first, but at least around
44:25
Speaker 1: the mouth. And they discovered these things a condition when
44:30
Speaker 1: they would take the teeth in the jaw X rays
44:33
Speaker 1: where they would find pockets of infection under the gum line,
44:37
Speaker 1: which now we just know are I mean, what is
44:39
Speaker 1: that just pockets of infection pus mouth pus. Yeah. Um.
44:44
Speaker 1: They called them focal infections. And the problem is is,
44:48
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a good thing that they spotted these,
44:50
Speaker 1: but they didn't know what they were, so they linked
44:52
Speaker 1: it to other stuff and other organs of the bodies,
44:55
Speaker 1: sometimes the brain even, and it become it became almost
44:59
Speaker 1: like a new version of blood letting in that for
45:01
Speaker 1: a while, if you had almost anything going wrong with you,
45:04
Speaker 1: sometimes and they showed, uh, these these pockets on the
45:09
Speaker 1: X ray. They would just pull your teeth like if
45:11
Speaker 1: you had a kidney disorder, they would pull your teeth first. Yeah,
45:14
Speaker 1: there was a guy who was apparently one of the
45:17
Speaker 1: leading proponents and practitioners of this focal infection hysteria. His
45:21
Speaker 1: name was Henry Cotton. He worked at the New Jersey
45:26
Speaker 1: State Lunatic Asylum is what they called at the time,
45:28
Speaker 1: between nineteen oh seven and nineteen thirty and he he
45:32
Speaker 1: and his team pulled eleven thousand human teeth during that time,
45:37
Speaker 1: including his own teeth, his wife's teeth, his children's teeth,
45:41
Speaker 1: but mostly inmates of this asylum. And the idea was
45:44
Speaker 1: that that infection had gone to your brain, so you
45:47
Speaker 1: had to pull the teeth out around it to treat
45:48
Speaker 1: the infection to cure your mental illness. And it just
45:52
Speaker 1: so happens, Chuck, that our good friend, our dear friend,
45:56
Speaker 1: beloved friend, John Hodgman played that man on the TV
45:59
Speaker 1: show of the Nick Oh, that's true, was that his character? Yeah,
46:04
Speaker 1: that guy existed in real life Hodgman's character and I
46:07
Speaker 1: read I came across a mention of it in Paste
46:10
Speaker 1: magazine said that um Hodgman played Henry Cotton quote with
46:15
Speaker 1: perfect offhand authority. I think it's one. But yeah, I
46:20
Speaker 1: didn't remember that he was playing Henry Cotton, this guy
46:22
Speaker 1: who was just pulling eleven thousand teeth from people over
46:26
Speaker 1: twenty three years to cure their mental illness, which is nuts,
46:29
Speaker 1: but it actually happened. You have to text him let
46:32
Speaker 1: him know we were talking about his acting career. I will.
46:37
Speaker 1: I'm sure he'll hear it when this comes out. He
46:39
Speaker 1: listens to every episode. The moment that really doesn't, someone
46:42
Speaker 1: will let him know. Uh. And then we wind out
46:45
Speaker 1: to kind of a guy who um weirdly ended up
46:49
Speaker 1: being uh for the wrong reasons, the person who changed
46:52
Speaker 1: dentistry for the better, and that he was not a
46:55
Speaker 1: good dentist. And he was came along at a time
46:58
Speaker 1: when the a d A had just formed in eighteen
47:01
Speaker 1: fifty nine. They met at Niagara Falls formed the a
47:04
Speaker 1: d A in eighteen sixty six. They said, you can't
47:08
Speaker 1: use you can't be a snake oil salesman anymore. You
47:11
Speaker 1: can't have these advertisements and personally solicit uh business like
47:16
Speaker 1: we gotta we gotta kind of put ourselves up there
47:18
Speaker 1: with the doctors guys and not do this stuff. And
47:22
Speaker 1: a dude came along that defied all that so much
47:24
Speaker 1: so that they really started to sort of codify and
47:28
Speaker 1: put that stuff in the rear view mirror. Well, they
47:30
Speaker 1: were trying to figure out how to differentiate themselves from
47:32
Speaker 1: just people who pulled teeth for a living but didn't
47:35
Speaker 1: go to dental school. And it's hard to do that, um.
47:39
Speaker 1: And they a way to do that is defined a
47:42
Speaker 1: scapegoat and point out how terrible they are, to to
47:46
Speaker 1: use them as an example of how great you are,
47:49
Speaker 1: right to make yourselves look good. And that's what they
47:51
Speaker 1: did with this guy, Edgar Randolph Painless Parker, who was
47:55
Speaker 1: very much as snake oil salesman, a charlatan. He was
47:58
Speaker 1: of the m of the kind of dentists that he
48:01
Speaker 1: actually did go to dental school. But he he was like,
48:04
Speaker 1: I'm losing money to these these tooth pullers, these tooth drawers,
48:07
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna start advertising again, and I think while
48:10
Speaker 1: I'm at it all, start making sneak coil and all
48:12
Speaker 1: that stuff. Um. But he was of the school where
48:14
Speaker 1: you would just like fill a tooth um with a
48:19
Speaker 1: like like amalgam, say mercury or something like that. And um,
48:23
Speaker 1: you wouldn't get rid of any of the decay, well
48:25
Speaker 1: you would, your face would still rot off regardless. But yes,
48:28
Speaker 1: your dental visit was painless because they didn't they didn't
48:32
Speaker 1: scrape out any of the cavity to start. Um, that's
48:35
Speaker 1: who they were competing against. So they used this guy
48:37
Speaker 1: to basically say all this stuff. This guy is doing.
48:40
Speaker 1: This guy right here, that's not dentistry. Come over here.
48:43
Speaker 1: What we're doing is actual dentistry. It's going to help
48:46
Speaker 1: your health. Yeah, and he like, like you said, he
48:50
Speaker 1: went to dental school. He went to the Philadelphia Dental College,
48:53
Speaker 1: but apparently he literally did not pass, like he would
48:56
Speaker 1: not have earned a degree had he not gone, and
48:58
Speaker 1: begged the dan to let him through. And I guess
49:02
Speaker 1: he sounds like sort of a squeaky wheel kind and
49:05
Speaker 1: I think they just wanted to be rid of him,
49:06
Speaker 1: so they said, fine, here's your degree. And so that's
49:09
Speaker 1: when he went to Canada and sat in an empty
49:11
Speaker 1: office because he couldn't he wasn't losing, like patients were
49:15
Speaker 1: coming and leaving, like he didn't have any patients to
49:17
Speaker 1: begin with. And um, so yeah, he started doing the
49:21
Speaker 1: snake whole thing, and he literally went back in time
49:24
Speaker 1: to become like a dental drawer and had these big
49:29
Speaker 1: sort of tooth pulling events and parties with the band
49:32
Speaker 1: just like they were in the heyday in the early
49:34
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, same same exact thing. Unbelievable. He also supposedly
49:39
Speaker 1: wore a necklace of three hundred and fifty seven extracted
49:42
Speaker 1: teeth that he supposedly pulled all in one day, which
49:48
Speaker 1: is what I made for a good live show. Oh well,
49:51
Speaker 1: let's save it. I don't think so this is all
49:54
Speaker 1: the makings of a great live show. Well, there's a
49:56
Speaker 1: whole thing. I agreed. There's a whole thing that we
49:59
Speaker 1: didn't even get to talk about called the amalgam Wars,
50:01
Speaker 1: which I think we're going to do with short stuff
50:03
Speaker 1: on because it was pretty interesting too. All right, Okay,
50:06
Speaker 1: I'm up. I'm up for it. So that's if for
50:09
Speaker 1: now for the history of dentistry. This may be an
50:12
Speaker 1: ongoing thing. Who knows? And uh, since I said this
50:15
Speaker 1: may be an ongoing thing, who knows? It's time of
50:18
Speaker 1: course for listener mail, I'm gonna call this I missed
50:26
Speaker 1: opportunity for a pavement reference. Oh yeah, I saw this one.
50:30
Speaker 1: Did you see this? This is from Alan Coleman, and
50:33
Speaker 1: this is about the Salem witch Trials. And I can't
50:35
Speaker 1: believe I walked right past this because this this is
50:37
Speaker 1: one of my favorite Pavement songs. He said, Hey, guys,
50:39
Speaker 1: love the podcast. I'm not one of those the chairs
50:42
Speaker 1: being able to send into correction, so this isn't one
50:43
Speaker 1: of those. I listened to Salem Witchcraft Trials and notice
50:46
Speaker 1: an unexpected omission being a big pavement in Silver Jeice Fan.
50:51
Speaker 1: For the majority of my life, I enjoy hearing your
50:52
Speaker 1: references occasionally. So I saw the title and I knew
50:55
Speaker 1: that you had mentioned the Pavement song Give It a Day,
50:57
Speaker 1: which is about Increase and Cotton Mather. Uh good work.
51:01
Speaker 1: Stay alert for those possible Pavement references. And I'm gonna
51:04
Speaker 1: read the first verse of that song because I know
51:07
Speaker 1: this song and it never really occurred to me. That's
51:09
Speaker 1: why I didn't get the ref in the episode. But
51:13
Speaker 1: it's kind of the most pavement of all Pavement songs, Uh.
51:17
Speaker 1: Increased mother told her dad. By the way he says
51:19
Speaker 1: her dad, I roundly disagree with you. Your vocals styles
51:23
Speaker 1: too preachy, and the yokels mock your teaching, but Cotton
51:27
Speaker 1: he was just so oblivious to all their cutting. Please.
51:30
Speaker 1: Soon the town folk took to it, and every pew
51:32
Speaker 1: they looked to him for guidance, just like eyeless lambs
51:35
Speaker 1: awaiting that old kebab. Stand the skeptics formed the nation's born.
51:40
Speaker 1: They want to have it Cotton's dream, but Increase had
51:43
Speaker 1: them mounted and they burned on open fires. So the
51:46
Speaker 1: words spread, just like smallpox in the Sudan, and the
51:49
Speaker 1: gentry cried, give it a day, Give it a day,
51:53
Speaker 1: Give it a day. That sounds pretty pavement. You're You're right,
51:57
Speaker 1: it's even when you listen to it, it's like it's
52:00
Speaker 1: like Steve Malcomus. It is most words, smithy working all
52:04
Speaker 1: those words in there album. Uh. I think that was
52:10
Speaker 1: from an EP If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't on
52:12
Speaker 1: a regular LP. I've definitely not heard that one, but
52:15
Speaker 1: thanks to Alan Coleman for that. I walked right past
52:17
Speaker 1: that way to go to Bob in Nostanovitch. If you're
52:19
Speaker 1: listening there, you go, uh, Well, if you want to
52:21
Speaker 1: get in touch with this like Alan did, or if
52:23
Speaker 1: you want to say hi and you're Bob Nostandovitch Chuck
52:26
Speaker 1: always likes hearing from you, Bob, Please right in. You
52:30
Speaker 1: can get in touch with this via email at stuff
52:33
Speaker 1: podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
52:39
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my
52:42
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
52:46
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.