Stuff You Should Know - The Twisted History of Dentistry

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

If you think going to the dentist now is not fun, just wait until you hear about what they did in the Middle Ages.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I charge all your cook for it. You making fun of me? This, I'm sorry, I had something in my mouth. It's stuff you should know

and I have no room to make fun of you, friend. I've been on my own dental journey for some time now and I'm still in the midst of it. What do you got going on? Oh, all sorts of stuff. I was not granted with great, strong, indestructible teeth and all that. Yeah, I know the feeling. I thought like, I just hadn't taken enough care of them or whatever, but now that I actually do take really good care of my teeth, I found like, no, they're just not as great as they could be, I think. Yeah, I'm fully aware with that emotion, as you know. And I don't even know if I said, I may have said on the air, but my front one, I'm going to have to have it redone. Yeah. Yeah, when is that going to happen? It's sort of, I mean, right now he's basically like,

it's not causing any trouble right now, but it's going to happen at some point. So he almost made it sound like whenever you feel like you're up for being toothless again for three months, let me know. So just in time for our next live show, whenever that is. Oh, geez. I forgot about that. I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. Well, it's not like you haven't been on stage without a tooth before. You take it them out. Like that was your shtick at the beginning of a number of shows. So don't get shy these days, Chuck. No, you got to work your deficiencies into humor. That's true. That's true. So we're talking about the history of dentistry, which by the way, people listening, I know you know this probably, but it wasn't until like late in

the 18th century that that word was even used really. They didn't even call it dentistry until then. They called it fizzle stick. And we should thank quite a few people here. I'm sure you have some websites that you looked at, but I went to the British Dental Association, arttook.org, History Daily. This great website called All Things Georgian. I think it's a blog where you can find some cool old pictures of antiquated dentistry tools. And then a book by James Weibrant called the excruciating history of dentistry, insert colon sound. Has that been happening, by the way? I don't think so. I think Jerry thought we were joking about that. So literally, I've just been saying that. I'm pretty sure. Well, I haven't picked it up

on any of the QA I've been doing. I haven't either. So we'll find out in this one. I'll pay extra attention to some tales and oral oddities from Babylon to braces. Very nice. Yeah. Huge, huge shout out also to our boy Dave Ruse for helping us with this one as well. Yeah, this was my idea. And as when we instructed Dave, I said, Hey, Dave, how about history of dentistry? And it's like, I don't want to talk about anything modern that works. I want to talk about all the old stuff. Right. All the stuff that they tried along the way that people screamed in excruciating pain. And actually, that's, I think that's good for pointing out, Chuck, that there are points where what stuff we're talking about like might actually make you feel faint. Like it happened to me.

Yeah, this is a trigger warning for sure. There was this one site called Science Museum Group Collection, cumbersome, but they have a lot of dental, old dental stuff in their collection. And they have very high res pictures and a lot of them have descriptions of how the thing was used. And like, I like, I'd like break out in a little trickle of sweat along the top of my lip and like get a little woozy just reading about this stuff. And I'm pretty tough with that kind of thing. I mean, I can talk about poop all the live long day, but when it comes to like pulling teeth out without anesthetics and things like that, it's my knees get a little wobbly. Yeah. And I don't know if you had the same reaction, but looking at these old dental tools,

it's, it's like, oh, well, that was clearly also this, you know, like some sort of iron smithing tool, right? Yeah, or whatever. And they just said, well, hey, I bet you if you move that little spawn divot over here, you could also use it to crank out a molar. And as we'll see, if you wanted a tooth removed for a very long time, depending on where you lived, you probably went to go see your local smithy. Yeah. Crazy stuff. Just settle in, everybody. Let's start at the very, very beginning, because for at least 7,000 years, people have been talking and writing about toothaches. The Babylonians, I believe, were among the first to ever create an alphabet to ever write anything down. And one of the things they wrote about was toothaches.

And the idea of where toothaches came from, which are called toothworms, Chuck, which are cute sounding, actually, you know? Yeah, the toothworm is what you think it is, even though it's not real, but little tiny worms that get in your mouth. And sometimes that they would originate in your mouth, like spontaneously, sometimes they got into your mouth somehow and worm their way, literally, into your tooth, like the non-existent core of an apple. And this is, you know, they said, all right, here's what you should do. You should do some sort of ceremony to the gods and ask for a little help from the gods. And then later on, they said, oh, maybe we can actually try something, and that early something, and this is 2250 BC. Yeah, 4250 years ago. Most people

would say 2250. They would heat up a piece of, they would heat up beeswax filled with henbane seeds and put it in your mouth. And so it basically fills your mouth up with the smoke of the henbane seed, which is a nightjade, and it can be really dangerous if there's a lot of it. But this kind of just showed you where they were at. It seems like all the earliest and for a long time mitigation efforts were at trying anything to just numb the pain a little bit for a while. Yeah, because henbane will do that in small doses. I'm sure. And it was basically like, let me stop the pain for a little while. But the pain would always come back. So eventually, they had to move to extraction. Yes. And that those toothworms, the toothworm theory of teeth pain

had some really like staying effect. Like it was around in the medieval times in Europe. If you actually go to medieval times today in your local suburb, you'll hear them talk about toothworms. And there was a... Is that true? No. I don't think so unless somebody really did their homework. It wouldn't surprise me. No. There was a study I ran across that talked about, and this was a paper from 1998 that talked about a Chinese traditional medicine practitioner who cited toothworms as the cause of somebody's toothache that they were healing, and they used that same beeswax henbane like medicine to treat it. Here's what I want to know. Did they actually see any worms ever? Was this somebody whose

mouth was so infected they got worms or something? Oh boy, wouldn't that be something? Oh my... I mean, I don't know. If they were completely invisible, it just seems a little weird. Maybe they saw pus, and it came out in kind of a worm-like form, like a zit from the gums, and somebody thought it was worms. Or who knows? Maybe somebody did have worms. It seems weird to just be like it's worms without anyone ever having seen worms of any kind. I told you guys. I didn't know that you were talking about mouth pus. Let's skip forward to ancient Egypt, where we have who may be the first dentist, and this is around 2600 B.C., or 2600, during the time of King... Is that Dozer? That's how I take it. J is silent, right?

Dehozer. Hey, Dehozer. There was a scribe called Hesse Rhee, who, and they read the hieroglyphics on the Scribes' burial chamber that basically said, this guy is the best in town at dentistry. He was the greatest of those who deal with teeth and of the physicians. And that was, I think, one of the first sort of mentions of someone written down on, well, not paper, but hieroglyphics, written down that someone actually did this for a living. Yeah. The paper actually did come not too much longer after that, the papyrus ebbers, which we've talked about many times. It's a scroll, and it had a lot of stuff,

medical ailments and treatments for those ailments. And there were treatments for toothaches and other kinds of oral problems, like bleeding gums and stuff like that. And of course, because what they had at hand at the time were medicinal cures, they prescribed all sorts of medicinal cures. And it's like you said, there was basically just this aim to cure the pain. And they would do all sorts of things, like use opium, or they would use that henbane or other kinds of night shade. But then also, problematically, they would use arsenic, which is, it really does kill disease tissue, sure, but it also can kill you too in some pretty horrific ways. What's crazy about that is

not that the ancient Egyptians were using that, like 3,500 years ago, but that was still in use into the modern age, like people were using arsenic for a very long time to treat mouth stuff. And in fact, we've done a lot of weird stuff to our mouth and used a lot of things we shouldn't have been using in our mouths over the years. I was trying to think of a bleeding gums Murphy joke there a minute ago, but all you have to do is say his name and there you go. You mentioned ancient Chinese medicine or traditional Chinese medicine, and they were kind of on board early on. It's funny, because sometimes people seem to be going toward the right thing, because they were using things like rinses and mouth washes.

Makes sense. They would also use enemas. I'm not sure about that. Enemas had been listed to cure a whole host of things, but I don't know about toothaches. It was more meant for the distraction, is my guess. Right. Then someone punches you in the mouth. Right. But acupuncture, of the 388 acupuncture sites for TCM, 26 of them are tied to toothache relief. Yeah. And then piling on from the different cultures that added and contributed to our general human knowledge of how to treat problems with the mouth, the Hindus from, say, like India and Southeast Asia and South Asia, they put their stuff down in the Vedas, which were a bunch of ancient texts, much like the Papyrus ebbers, which dealt with

things like medical conditions, including how to not just treat tooth problems and teeth pain, but also how to prevent it. And they actually prescribed using a twig with the end frayed to you to basically chew on and also just brush with. It was the first earliest toothbrush, and they also had dentrophyses, which is something you would use to clean or polish or scrape off your teeth, made of honey, oil, and herbs, which is pretty great. That was pretty groundbreaking, frankly. Yeah. And people still use, I mean, in survival handbooks and stuff, they say if you're lost in the woods for many, many days, you're going to want to take care of your teeth. It sounds silly, but if you're wandering around for three weeks, you want to just feel

fresh. But the whole twig frayed twig thing is what they still, people still do that in different cultures around the world chewing on twigs. You can even buy some of that stuff still here in the West and dental twigs to chew on and stuff. Yeah. And if you ever have closely watched Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow uses one in that movie. Does she really? She does. I saw it. I don't know if I closely watched it though. Well, you need to go back and closely watch it. That thing is full of so many, like so much imagery, so much Illuminata stuff. It's crazy. Really? No. Did you watch it recently? No. For some reason, her chewing on that twig made an enormous

impression on me because I haven't seen that movie since the 90s, but I've never forgotten that. And it's not like one of those things where I only think of it when I'm confronted with Shakespeare in Love. It just pops into my head every once in a while, weirdly. So I was primed for this episode, Chuck. So when I say the words Gwyneth Paltrow, I know you think of two things in this order. Her duet with Huey Lewis. That's third. Cruisin. Why did you just do that to me? Chewing on twigs. What's the third one? Just goop in general. Oh, okay. That's probably just goop. Second. So chewing on the twig, goop, and then yes, that duet that I can sometimes push out of my head until you bring it up. So now we move on to Ancient Rome, which is where

things sort of took a leap forward in a way like a lot of stuff did in Ancient Rome, not to the kind of modern dental work that we're used to today, obviously, but for the time, not too bad in that they did things like crowns. They did bridge work. They had dental prosthetics made from things like ivory or bone, which makes sense. So they kind of advanced things a little bit. Oh, I would say a huge bit, if you ask me. Dental prosthetics, it's an enormous leap forward. Yeah, but I mean, I'm sure they look pretty janky, you know. Well, you could still chew a turkey leg and by God, you'd be grateful you could. Probably so. It didn't matter what you looked like in Ancient Rome. Everybody's too wasted on wine. Oh, I missed my time and place, didn't I? You really

did. There was a physician their name, Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who supposedly filled the first cavities, but they weren't traditionally like we think of cavities. They were from poured lead and they were meant to serve as something to grab onto to actually pull a tooth. So I guess he would do it to like some sort of a post or a stem or something. I think he would pour, yeah, it's weird because you would have to use molten lead and you can't just go around pouring that on people's teeth and expecting their face to not fall off. Or develop a nice post to take on. I get the impression that he molded it around whatever tooth was left so that he had more gripping power on it. That was my take on it, but it did end up

becoming like I guess at the very least, it's noteworthy that he kind of came up with the dental fillings even if that wasn't the point of it. Right. And then before I guess we break, we should mention this one more kind of fun fact. This is tough. In Ancient Rome for a mouthwash, they recommended rinsing the mouth with the first urine of the morning, which everyone knows is the densest yellowest urine of the day. Protein rich. So we are going to break now because I have that taste in my mouth. Thanks to you. Urine? Yeah. I'm very, very suggestible. Have you ever drank urine? No. No, I can say 100% that I never have. I think most people can say one way or the other, right? Yeah. Well,

yeah, that's a yes or no question. Yeah, yeah. I'm like sort of, but a little bit. I haven't either. I was just, I was just wondering, you never know. Yeah. Well, it's good though, after 13 years, we're still exploring one another. All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll be back right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my

life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and

the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we're back and we're into the Middle Ages now. I don't know if anyone's caught onto this, but we're loosely organizing this sequentially over the years. And we've reached the Middle Ages. Middle Ages of Europe, I should say specifically. And after Rome fell in so many ways, and of course we've talked about it before, but the Middle Ages are often called the Dark Ages. You're not even supposed to call them the Middle Ages because it makes the stuff that happened during this time inconsequential. And it's just not the case. But it is true that the practice of dentistry really took a nosedive during this time. So this is actually a pretty good example of how human

knowledge and, well, the human knowledge of how to do things smartly really fell off for a little while. Had to be rediscovered. That's right. And it was around this time that physicians, like they were something special back then, but the physician said, I'm not messing around with teeth. Like the mouth is beneath me, which is funny that that's still sort of a thing. Right. Yeah, it's true. As far as like, what movie was that the hangover when Ed Helms was a dentist and none of the doctors like give him any respect? Wasn't it on Seinfeld that George pretended to be a dentist for a little while? Was it?

He pretended to be an architect. Right. But there was something mixed in about a dentist there. It was going to be like a dentist at first. Maybe, I don't know. Well, there was the dentist too, which was, what's his face? Cranston. Tim Watley. Yeah, Tim. Tim Watley. Nice call. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. Well, there's something in there. He pretended to be a dentist. Maybe the kid double crossed, the kid that George was sponsoring for the Susan's Foundation was, said he wanted to be an architect. And then when he takes him in there for the scholarship,

he changes, he double crosses them and says he wants to be a dentist. And everybody laughs about how stupid architects are, even though George is pretending to be an architect. I think we may have hammered it out here live on the episode. So if physicians did not pull teeth, that was left to a couple of other people, professions. One was called a tooth drawer, not a tooth drawer. And the first reference I found of this was Peter of London in 1320. Okay. You're a better researcher than I am. That's not true, but... It is Chuck, at least in this case, it is very true because I looked high and low and did not turn that up. To find them two drawers from the Middle Ages?

Yeah. Well, I think they started in the 1300s, but I do think you're right in that they had their sort of apex probably in like the 17 and 1800s. And we'll explain what they are. They are exactly the character that... What's his face played in? Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained. Yes, when he played the dentist. Now, he would have been... He was kind of like a tooth drawer. No, he definitely was. He was an itinerant dentist for sure. And yes, he was like a more tooth drawer than what you would consider a dentist in today's standards. But I also have the impression that tooth drawers were way more showman-like, much less scrupulous and refined.

And they were just kind of like charlatans. And actually the word charlatan is the Italian for tooth drawer. Yeah, I thought that that's who that character was though. We just didn't get a CM practice that much. I see. I see. Okay. Maybe so. Because he wasn't doing dentistry in the movie, but he rolled through with that big old tooth on the spring of his buggy, which is pretty fun. But I'm sure at the very least, Tarantino sort of based it on this practice, which was they would come into town. They were sort of part entertainer, not even part dentist, because what they really were were just people with enough to take pliers and yank a tooth out of somebody's mouth. On a stage. Yes, on a stage. And they would

be surrounded by a band, maybe, depending on what era we're talking about. They might have jugglers and acrobats. They basically surrounded themselves with a circus. And the main attraction, the main event was the pulling of teeth. And it would just be like one after the other. Come on up here. And that was a lot of times your only option, depending on where you lived, was to wait around for the tooth drawer to come along and hopefully pull your teeth. Or again, like we talked about before, you might have somebody in town who was a blacksmith or a goldsmith who would be willing to pull teeth and maybe even made like some sort of primitive dental appliances to replace the pulled tooth with. So you would go see them, they'd pull the tooth and then they'd put

like a, I don't know, an iron tooth in its place or something like that. But that was your options for a very long time. Yeah. And I think the tooth drawer, the purpose of the band was to distract people from the pain, the howling pain. So the band would, they would literally tap on the stage louder for the band to play louder when it got more intense. And they would, you know, they would dope them up with like liquor or something. And part of it was to like pull teeth, but not like, Hey, I want to pull 50 teeth in this town to make money. I think it was like 50 cents a tooth. It was mainly, I think to sell the tonics and the salves and all that snake oil stuff that came along with it as well. Yeah, that's where they get you. That's totally where they get

you. This is where they get you. Yeah. So, okay. So tooth drawers were medieval, but that's really impressive that they lasted until the 18th century. They were around for a really long time. One of the problems was that not only were they charlatans, like one of their techniques when they came into town, the first person they would call on was like a plant who was working with them and would come up with like a tooth in their mouth already. And the dentist would pretend to just painlessly pull it and they'd spit this tooth out and there you go. And then all of a sudden, everybody who actually did have tooth pain would be willing to come up on stage. They were hucksters. They're worth from what I saw, actual like legit ones who cared about people and wanted to ease

suffering, the Christoph Waltz of the tooth drawers. Right. But there were plenty for the most part, they were generally viewed as carnies. You didn't talk openly about how much money you had in your wallet around them kind of thing. Right. And at the beginning of this section, we mentioned that there were a couple of types of people who would do it because physicians wouldn't. The tooth drawer was one and then the barber surgeon was the other. If you've ever seen the great Saturday Night Live skit from years ago with Steve Martin as Theodoric of York, one of the great all-time skits. I don't think I've seen that one. He was a barber and of course everything that comes in there and he's like,

you just need a good bleeding. Like Bill Murray came in with both of his legs broken off and just blood everywhere. And he's like, you need a bleeding. He's like, I'm already bleeding. It's good stuff. I gotta see it. But barbering was first introduced in Rome in about 296. And they think that they got into dentistry some because they already had the tools, like sharp things basically. And eventually they would split. Barber surgeons would split up in 1745. But before that, they were literally barbers and surgeons. They would cut hair and stuff and also cut you open if they needed to. Yeah. But when they split off, it's not like the barber surgeons stopped cutting you open. They would still do limb amputations. They would do

bleeding like bloodletting with leeches. They would do tooth pulling and they would also shave you and give you a haircut. It was like the other stuff that the medical surgeons who went to the universities, the early universities for training, that's what they kind of kept as their own. They became the physicians where the barber surgeons were doing stuff anybody could do, like amputating a limb. Right. And the theodoric of York a bit is appropriate here because that's sort of what the whole bloodletting and bleeding thing was. They would bleed people for all kinds of things, including tooth pain. They would say, I think all the way up until the first half of the 1800s, if you had a cavity or something, they would bleed you first. Like first thing, it was just a matter

of course. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And Dave turned up as late as 1917, a guy named Charles Edmond Kelz, who was respected for dentistry, wrote a treatise on how to put, how to direct leeches to a specific spot on the gums to bleed that part of the gums. And I looked into my great astonishment, Chuck. We have not done an episode on leeches and by God, we are going to do an episode on that. Really? I know. We did one on medical leeches, right? We did a bizarre medical treatments episode once. Okay. And that was in there? And it was in there. But I mean, it's perfect. It's like weird medical stuff, animal episode. It's got it all. It's gonna be a great one. Movie references. Sure. Yeah, to the movie leeches. Gotta talk about Stand by Me. Oh yeah,

they have that movie. But also leeches too, right? Was there a movie called leeches? I'm sure there was. And I think it had an exclamation point. Well, I'll tell you what, if there's not that movie, we'll do that movie too. Okay, like we'll make it ourselves? Yeah, yeah. Starring us, written, directed by us, the whole deal. This sounds awesome. We could just go back and use our This Day in History series and just dub in new dialogue and call it a day. That's right. So the tools that they would use, this is where I went to that all things Georgian website. There were all kinds of things. It was something called a dental pelican. All these were versions of foresips at the end of the day. The pelican looks sort of like ice tongs. Yeah. Like for big blocks

of ice. I couldn't make heads or tails of how it used. I don't know. I mean, there's something called a dental key, which could be used to either lever out your tooth or just break it into pieces. That was the one that made me feel first faint. So George III's operator for the teeth, Thomas Birdmore, wrote some stuff in his treatise on the disorders and deformities of the teeth and gums in 1770. And he talked about this lady that came in that had a bad tooth that needed to be pulled, one of her upper molars. And he said that after some work, he brought away the affected tooth together with a piece of jaw bone as big as a walnut and three neighboring molars. Good Lord. Yeah. So that was, I'm glad you said that. I ran into that all over the place. One of the problems

with pre-trained dentistry where there was actual science-based treatments and stuff like that. When you had your tooth pulled, there was a really good chance that a big chunk of the bone and your jaw was going to come out along with it because they didn't know what they were doing. You could die from it. A lot of people actually died from an infection that was brought on by a badly pulled tooth, a botched tooth drawing. Yeah. This is, I mean, it's sad, but it's kind of funny too because it was so long ago. But the Bill of Mortality in London in 1665, the number five cause of death on the Bill of Mortality was just teeth. How'd they die? That's all you need to say. That's it. There were apparently 111 people in London died from infections in one week

brought on by botched dental pullings. Again, we don't mean to be laughing, but comedy is tragedy plus time, right? Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. I've got one that's coming up that I just can't help. Okay. So we finally have reached that 18th century where that's, interestingly, that's the heyday of the tooth draws that we described, like where they roll into town with like a circus around them and everything. The early 18th century was when they were really doing that up. But at the same time, this is also the origin of dentistry as we understand it today, like modern dentistry. And there were two guys that are typically pointed to as the fathers of dentistry. One is a Frenchman named Pierre Fouchard. Yeah. And the other is an American

named Green Vardeman Black, which is a pretty cool name. GBB. Yeah. If you have two colors in your name, that is impressive. You don't see that very often. Like his name is Green Black. Yeah. I never thought about that. Well, you've just heard his name recently. You know what you get when you mix green and black? Like black? I think black, right? Yeah. So you could just call him black. So Pierre Fouchard, he pioneered a lot of things, but one of the funny things that you never really think about as far as an advancement was literally just putting people in an armchair to work on them. Genius. Apparently before then, they would lay people on the floor and I guess get on

their knees the dentist would and put their head between their knees and like hold it between their knees and thighs to keep it steady because it was such an awful thing. Yes. I mean, that was dentistry. Yeah. So it really was like cutting edge to be like, how about you just make yourself comfortable in this chair and I'll stand over you instead. And me comfortable. Right. And that wasn't the extent of Fouchard's contributions. He was the first to create like evidence-based treatments. He just kind of poo-pooed the idea of just following tradition. He felt tradition was probably not so great and he wanted to apply science and rationalism, I guess, to the whole pursuit of treating people's teeth problems.

He also got really good at creating like prosthetics, like dentures and things like that, that he would string together. He also was known for introducing a lot of the dental tools. I don't know if he invented all of them, but he organized and categorized them and basically his treatise, I think it was a two-volume work that spanned 800 pages, basically set down like, here's how you be like a legitimate dentist, 1750s style. And a lot of his observations were so, they were just accurate that they still hold true today, although I've seen his work as being described as primitive, but that's what pioneers do. They produce accurate, primitive work. What about Green Black? Was he basically in the same boat?

I didn't see a lot about him. I didn't do a lot of research on Green Black. I just saw that both of them tend to be tied together as they kind of split that name as the father of the industry. The co-fathers? Yeah. I saw much more on Foshard. Should we take a break now? Sure. All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk about anesthetics and toothbrushes, toothpaste, all that good stuff right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to

guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangeh Shatikler. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So now, Chuck, we finally reached the point where dentistry doesn't have to be the worst thing that ever happened to you in your entire life.

Then why is it the worst thing that happens to me? Because you're failing to imagine how bad it could be. We should thank our lucky stars that we were born into an era where there's such a thing as anesthetics. Yeah. I mean, they did their best back in the day. Like we mentioned earlier, they were using plants, they were using nightshades, they were using opium, hashish, kind of whatever they could get their hands on to make people feel a little better while you're doing this horrific stuff. Party at the dentist's office. That's right. You would use, that's still the best part of when I get my implants,

you know, that like 12 seconds of bliss. What do you get? Do they give you nitrous? Twilight sleep. Oh, okay. Wow, that's the good stuff, huh? Yeah, that's wonderful. You get an IV with that? Yeah, you get the IV in about eight seconds of, you know, the best part of your week. Right.

And then you wake up and your mouth is a little sore. Like when you're counting backwards and you're like, oh man, they know. I'm totally wasted. I know, and they're making fun of me. So sleep sponges was another thing they used. They would soak sponges in hemlock again, opium, mandrake, whatever they had, and then dry it out in the sun. And then it was just kind of there at your disposal.

And when you wanted to use it, you would just activate it by dipping it in some water, put it under their nostrils, and there you go. Yep. Goodbye. Good night. I also didn't know this, and apparently a lot of people don't, because I saw it mentioned here or there, but nobody seemed to have much detail about it. But ether, which I squarely place in the 19th century, as far as Anastagos go, was actually known to humans from the 1200s. I didn't know that.

Yeah, there was an alchemist named Raymond Lolis or Ramon Loli. He was Spanish, but he was an alchemist, and he somehow stumbled onto ether. I could not get the details, but he saw that like, oh, this is really good at pain killing. He called it sweet vitriol, but apparently it was just lost. The knowledge was lost to history for about five, six hundred years, which is that's an example of why the Middle Ages or that shouldn't be called the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages. Like that was a discovery.

It's just that at the time, everybody was too stupid to spread that information, I guess. Right. And then finally, in the 1770s, we come upon one of the greatest discoveries, nitrous oxide, which is so great, we did a whole episode on it. So we don't really need to go over all of this again. But one of the things I don't even know if we mentioned back then, because I feel like I would have remembered this, but one of the young scientists early on who was practicing with it named Humphrey Davy would put it in a sack to huff, and he called them paradise bags.

What a great name. Yep. I think I remember us saying that. Well, the long and short of nitrouses, it came and went over the years with various successful demonstrations in front of big groups of doctors and dentists, some not so successful in front of big groups. And so it ebbed and flowed in popularity as a result. Yeah. Horace Wells famously botched a demonstration that set nitrous oxide back

a good 20 years, basically. Yeah. But a couple of years after that, one of his students, W.T.G. Morton, said, hey, everybody, you thought nitrous oxide was something? Check out Ether. And he introduced Ether through a demonstration and showed how somebody could have a tumor removed without even batting an eyelash. And everybody was like, okay, this Ether is pretty good. So Ether soaked rags for a very long time and anesthetic used in surgery, but also dentistry too.

And then laughing gas came back about 20 years after Wells's botched demonstration. So by the late 19th century, the mid-late 19th century, we had two very powerful anesthetics that just completely changed the course of dentistry. And I think allowed people to start being like, okay, I'm willing to start actually going to see a dentist now if they've got this stuff to offer. Right. And so they said, you know what would be even better? Is if we gave them cocaine. And there was a dentist, an American named William Stewart Halstead, who was the first

person, I guess, they noticed, hey, when we're taking this stuff and we put it in our mouth, it makes our mouth numb. So maybe we can use it for dentistry, right? Yeah. And so they did. He was telling somebody this in the bathroom. That's right. And they're like, oh, God, this guy's such a bore.

They injected, he was the first one to inject it into the patient's gum and jaw for pain relief. And so that, you know, following that forward, there were a lot of cocaine-based toothache remedies. Obviously, you know, cocaine had the dark side. So they replaced it with new cocaine or novocaine and some other, you know, non-addictive pain relievers. But for a while, their cocaine was certainly used in dentistry. Yeah.

Apparently, Halstead said that he lost three assistants to cocaine addiction. And Dave puts like, they actually died. And I was just thinking like, I can just imagine Halstead like hearing like a thump in the other room and just being like, God, another one. Can you just imagine like losing three of your assistants to overdose deaths from cocaine, shooting up cocaine and like you're just trying to do your dentistry practice? And then he threw them in his convertible and drove them over to Eric Stoltz's house. And it all worked out.

Yeah. Man. We got pop culture flying all over the place today. We do. So now we're at toothbrushes and toothpaste sort of a little more in earnest in that they, you know, we kind of talked about the ancient stuff that they would use, these tree twigs and stuff like that. Gwyneth Paltrow. Yeah. Gwyneth Paltrow.

But they, they would use cloth. I think the Queen of England used cloth and toothpicks until the mid 19th century, basically any kind of manufacturing process kind of didn't make it affordable to even make regular toothbrushes. So it was cloth and sponge and rinses and stuff like that. But I think they eventually worked out the toothbrush and they needed something to put on the toothbrush at which point they said, how about just some really strong scrubbing? What's the word I'm looking for?

Bubbles, scrubbing bubbles. No, like what's the power, like an abrasive powder. And they used stuff like crushed coral and pumice, but that would ruin your teeth after a few weeks. Oh yeah, really quickly. And so toothpaste came along and it still followed that same pattern where apparently the earliest incarnations of pepsident had something that was an abrasive that you could actually cut glass with.

And there was another one, another toothpaste called tartar off that had hydrochloric acid in it. Tartar off for sure. I mean, it would make your teeth white for sure, but then it would eventually wear them down to nubs in like a few months, you know? Yeah, I think it took a while to kind of find the right balance between protecting the teeth and cleaning the teeth at the same time. Yeah, and I mean, there's still abrasives in your toothpaste today.

They've just gotten a lot better at getting it just the right amount so that yeah, it doesn't wear your enamel down. It's like baking soda and stuff like that, right? Yeah, I ran across something on I think the ADA website that in America, toothpaste and brushing your teeth in general did not become widespread. It wasn't like the norm until after World War II. And it was because American GIs returned from Europe saying, hey, it's crazy. Everybody over in Europe has like actually like nice breath, and this is how they do

it. And that's when it really took off from what I understand. Really? Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, it is. It is cool in a way, but also like wow in another way. Like these are my grandparents we're talking about.

Right. The greatest generation. That's right. The greatest generation. We can dispel the myth that George Washington had wooden teeth. He had terrible teeth and he had a really bad time with his teeth. I feel bad for him. So he did have fake teeth, but they were, I think the bases were made from ivory and tusk

and stuff like that. Right. But the human, the teeth were actually human teeth. They were from, we talked about grave robbing in the live episode that we did. They would grave rob for teeth, good teeth. They would people, poor people that had decent teeth would sell their teeth for money. They actually documented that he paid his slaves for teeth, which on the one hand you're like, oh, that's pretty cool.

He actually paid his slaves rather than said, go bring me some of my slaves teeth. But at the same time I was reading about it and they were like, it doesn't matter really what he paid them unless it was just some eye popping amount. It's still like, it's an inherently inequitable transaction. But I do feel bad for George Washington in that he apparently kind of suffered with his teeth. Like there's nobody, especially in America whose teeth have ever been talked about and written about more than George Washington. I'm second place.

You are a close second, but he's definitely the first place winner. Yeah, I think so. And he apparently, one of the reasons why he wore dentures and like kind of suffered through this and insisted on wearing them all the time was because his, he was the face of this new nation. He was the first president, right? And at the time it was, his vitality, his health, his strength was basically the same as the nation's health and strength.

And so for him to show any kind of weakness or problem or disease or anything like that would make people wonder like, oh, does that also mean that this new American experiment is also diseased and has problems? And so in a way, like he really kind of carried this burden for the country, for the image of the country. But yeah, his teeth are, he had like no teeth by the time he was 51. They all fell out and they started falling out when he was in his early 20s. Yeah, I feel for him.

I was talking to you because I was like, we've seen his teeth. And I thought, we both actually thought that maybe we saw it at the Memorial Masonic Temple in Old Town, Alexandria, but I don't think they're there. So we think we saw him in Mount Vernon because supposedly that's where they are. But both of us remember seeing them at that Masonic Temple. I've been to Mount Vernon a couple of times. I don't remember seeing his teeth. So I wonder if we did see his teeth at the Masonic Temple and they moved him to Mount Vernon

and now I'm looking on the internet and it's like, no, they're at Mount Vernon, silly. Maybe it was the Museum of Sex. They had George Washington's chattering teeth. Very sexy. So now we move on to x-rays, which were discovered in 1895 by German scientists. They started using those on the mouth pretty quickly. But a thing kind of popped up early on that ended up being bad and that they didn't really know how to read x-rays that well.

At least, probably everywhere at first, but at least around the mouth. And they discovered these things, a condition when they would take the teeth and the jaw x-rays where they would find pockets of infection under the gum line, which now we just know are, I mean, what is that? Just pockets of infection. It's pus, mouth pus. Yeah. They call them focal infections. And the problem is, I mean, it's a good thing that they spotted these, but they didn't know what

they were. So they linked it to other stuff and other organs of the bodies, sometimes the brain, even. And it became almost like a new version of bloodletting in that for a while, if you had almost anything going wrong with you sometimes, and they showed these pockets on the x-ray, they would just pull your teeth. Like if you had a kidney disorder, they would pull your teeth first. Yeah. There was a guy who was apparently one of the leading proponents and practitioners of this focal infection hysteria. His name was Henry Cotton. He worked at the New Jersey State lunatic asylum, is what they call that at the time, between 1907 and 1930.

And he and his team pulled 11,000 human teeth during that time, including his own teeth, his wife's teeth, his children's teeth, but mostly inmates of this asylum. And the idea was that that infection had gone to your brain, so you had to pull the teeth out around it to treat the infection, to cure your mental illness. And it just so happens, Chuck, that our good friend or dear friend, beloved friend, John Hodgman, played that man on the TV show, The Nick. Oh, that's true. Was that his character? Yeah. That guy existed in real life, Hodgman's character. And I read, I came across a mention of it in Paste Magazine, said that Hodgman played Henry Cotton, quote, with perfect offhand authority, which I think is one

of the best. I remember him on The Nick, but yeah, I didn't remember that. He was playing Henry Cotton, this guy who was just pulling 11,000 teeth from people over 23 years to cure their mental illness, which is nuts, but it actually happened. You have to text him, let him know we were talking about his acting career. I will. I'm sure he'll hear it when this comes out. He listens to every episode of the moment. No, he doesn't. Someone will let him know. And then we wind out to kind of a guy who weirdly ended up being, for the wrong reasons, the person who changed dentistry for the better, and that he was not a good dentist. And he was, came along at a time when the ADA had just formed in 1859. They met at Niagara Falls,

formed the ADA in 1866. They said, you can't use, you can't be a snake oil salesman anymore. You can't have these advertisements and personally solicit business. We got to kind of put ourselves up there with the doctors guys and not do this stuff. And a dude came along that defied all that, so much so that they really started to sort of codify and put that stuff in the rear view mirror. Well, they were trying to figure out how to differentiate themselves from just people who pulled teeth for a living, but didn't go to dental school. And it's hard to do that. And a way to do that is to find a scapegoat and point out how terrible they are to use them as an example of how great you are, right, to make yourselves look good. And that's what they did with this guy,

Edgar Randolph Painless Parker, who was very much a snake oil salesman of charlatan. He was of the kind of dentist that he actually did go to dental school, but he was like, I'm losing money to these tooth pullers, these tooth drawers. So I'm going to start advertising again. And I think while I'm at it, I'll start making snake oil and all that stuff. But he was of the school where you would just like fill a tooth with like amalgam, say mercury or something like that. And you wouldn't get rid of any of the decay. Well, your face would still rot off regardless. But yes, your dental visit was painless because they didn't scrape out any of the cavity to start. That's who they were competing against. So they used this guy to basically say,

all this stuff this guy is doing, this guy right here, that's not dentistry. Come over here. What we're doing is actual dentistry. It's going to help your health. Yeah. And he, like you said, he went to dental school. He went to the Philadelphia Dental College. But apparently, he literally did not pass. Like he would not have earned a degree had he not gone and begged the Dean to let him through. And I guess he sounds like sort of a squeaky wheel kind. And I think they just wanted to be rid of him. So they said, fine, here's your degree. And so that's when he went to Canada and sat in an empty office because he couldn't, he wasn't losing like patients were coming and leaving. Like he didn't have any patients to

begin with. And so yeah, he started doing the snake hole thing and he literally went back in time to become like a dental drawer and had these big sort of tooth pulling events and parties with a band. Just like they were in the heyday in the early 18th century. Same exact thing. Unbelievable. He also supposedly wore a necklace of 357 extracted teeth that he supposedly pulled all in one day. Which is made for a good live show. Oh, well, let's save it. I don't think so. This has all the makings of a great live show. Well, there's a whole thing. I agreed. There's a whole thing that we didn't even get to talk about called the Amalgam Wars, which I think we're going to do a short stuff on because it was pretty interesting too.

All right. Okay. I'm up. I'm up for it. So that's it for now for the history of Dentistry. This may be an ongoing thing. Who knows? And since I said this may be an ongoing thing, who knows? It's time, of course, for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this a missed opportunity for a pavement reference. Oh yeah, I saw this one. Did you see this? This is from Alan Coleman. And this is about the Salem Witch Trials. And I can't believe I walked right past this because this is one of my favorite pavement songs. He said, hey guys, love the podcast. I'm not one of those that cherish being able to send in a correction. So this isn't one of those. I listened to Salem Witchcraft Trials and noticed an unexpected

omission. Being a big pavement and silver Jews fan for the majority of my life, I enjoy hearing your references occasionally. So I saw the title and I knew that you had mentioned the pavement song Give It A Day, which is about increase in cotton mather. Good work. Stay alert for those possible pavement references. And I'm going to read the first verse of that song because I know this song and it never really occurred to me. That's why I didn't get the ref in the episode. But it's kind of the most pavement-y of all pavement songs. It sounds like it. Increase Mather told her dad, by the way he says her dad, I roundly disagree with you. Your vocal style's too preachy. And the yokels mock your teaching.

But cotton, he was just so oblivious to all their cutting pleas. Soon the town folk took to it. In every pew they looked to him for guidance just like eyeless lambs awaiting that old kebab stand. The skeptics formed. The nation's born. They want a habit, cotton's dream. But increase had them mounted and they burned on open fires. So the word spread just like smallpox in the Sudan and the gentry cried. Give it a day, give it a day, give it a day. That sounds pretty pavement-y. You're right. And when you listen to it, it's like Steve Malkimus said is most word smithy. Working all those words in there. That's awesome. I gotta hear that. What album is that one on? I think that was from an EP, if I'm not mistaken. It wasn't on a regular LP.

I've definitely not heard that one. But thanks to Alan Coleman for that. I walked right past that. Way to go, Alan. Hello to Bob Nistanovich if you're listening. There you go. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Alan did or if you want to say hi and you're Bob Nistanovich, Chuck always likes hearing from you. Bob, please write in. You can get in touch with us via email at StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think

to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject,

something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.