Toothaches were believed to be caused by… worms?

There was a time that people didn’t know the existence of cavities, and even less the world the microscopic bacteria. Therefore when someone had a toothache, they believed that it was caused by very little worms!

The idea now sounds very nasty, but around the 15th century, the dentist profession didn’t exist, and physicians thought that there were “tooth worms” that were causing teeth to hurt and to break apart! Those doctors prescribed a remedy for toothaches that involved lighting a candle and letting the smoke go inside your mouth and fill it. Then, you would lean your head over a warm bowl of water so the pain-causing tooth worms would fall out of your mouth and into the water.

The idea is very disturbing, even for a dentist like me. It makes me so glad that now, to treat a toothache, you can go to place and let professionals take care of you in a sterilized environment!

Links

• Tooth worm, Clinical Infectious Diseases – Oxford Journals
• Image, Liliane A. Avalos
• Dentist profession, Studio Dentaire

History of anesthesia for surgery

The first person to have historically used anaesthesia to perform surgery was a dentist!

William Thomas Green Morton was the first dentist to use anaesthesia to achieve a painless tooth extraction on September 30th 1846. He used ether as an anaesthetic agent in his own dental office. Then, on October 16, 1846, Morton participated in a surgery where Dr. John Collins Warren used ether as anaesthesia on a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital to remove a tumour in the neck without pain. Following this procedure, the news spread out globally and Morton convinced the medical world of the importance of performing surgical procedures without pain.

Links

• William T. G. Morton on Wikipedia
• Dentist profession