Farewell to the days of tooth worms and ‘barber-dentists’

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There I was a complete wimp on the dentist’s chair with some involuntary muscle movements giving away my deep-seated fear of the tooth doctor, when I thought to myself, what would have happened 200 years ago in the year 1818, if a cavity in a molar had started to give me bother. Were there dentists around at that time? Was there any form of anaesthetic available? What would have been the tools used to perform an extraction.

Given the fact that my recent treatment was, in cold objectivity, a procedure carried out without even a tinge of pain, I breathed a sigh of relief half way through the session and sighed in silence to myself that: “Isn’t it just great to live in the 21st century.”

The history of teeth problems and solutions, as might be expected goes back many centuries. A little trawl through the history of dentistry indicates evidence of dental issues back as far as 7000BC in the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilisation that populated the Indian sub-continent.

Things really began to ‘advance’ dramatically a few thousand years later when the Sumarians at last ‘cracked’ the root cause of dental problems as being tiny worms that bored holes in teeth and then hid inside the resultant little cavities.

If I had been a man of Sumarian times, then my most recent painless visit to my 21st century professional, would have paled into complete insignificance. A type of dentist developed during the Sumarian era who put his professional credibility on the line on ‘his nose’ for tracking down those worms in the tooth cavities . . . not too bad apparently until he hit a nerve and tried to extract it, on the basis that it was an offending worm. That does not really bear thinking about.

Apparently this bizarre theory about worm infestation being the cause of rotten teeth survived until close to the 1700s when at last some decent medical and dental research, eventually started to move on to more orthodox theories of tooth decay being linked to acid producing sugars.

A major development through the 1700s was the new job title of barber-surgeon, a place where you could get a haircut, a shave, and most importantly of all get a troublesome tooth extracted. The hairstylists and barbers of today really just aren’t ‘half-qualified’!

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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