What if You Needed Dental Treatment in the 1800s and 1900s?
Question by Patrick: what if you needed dental treatment in the 1800s and 1900s?
before dental treatment was modernized what would they do way back in the day if you needed a tooth pulled?were there such things as fillings,crowns,dentures?
Best answer:
Answer by keiko
they had dentures way back before that. Probably had fillings. Lots of people just waited until it hurt like the dickens and had their teeth pulled.
Answer by Rachel Smith
Hello
my nanny is in her 90’s and had all her teeth pulled and had dentures. Thy did not bother saving teeth back then as they do now. They pulled them. My Grandad had all his pulled too.Modern dental floss was invented around 1810 and modern tooth paste around 1820. Dentistry began to take its modern form in 1728 when Frenchman, Pierre Fauchard, published his book The Surgeon Dentist, a comprehensive work whose use eventually crowned Fauchard as the father of modern dentistry.
In England during the middle 1800s, anybody could become a dentist without any training whatsoever, though some people paid as much as $ 1,000 to learn the trade. The first root canals were performed in the United States in the 1830s. Arsenic was used to devitalise the pulp or root, which was then scooped out, all of this done without anaesthetic.
In 1773, nitrous oxide (a.k.a. laughing gas) was discovered by chemist Joseph Priestly, but it wasn’t used as an anaesthetic until 1844. About the same time, ether was also used as an anaesthetic in dentistry. Then chloroform drew people’s attention, first used as an anaesthetic in 1847.
In the Western dentistry of the time, early amalgam fillings contained a mixture of silver and mercury. By itself mercury is quite toxic. If it doesn’t bind completely with the silver, leakage can occur, harming the patient. And these fillings were poured at a temperature of over 200 degrees, certainly very hot when applied to the exposed nerves in ones teeth!
In America in the late 1800s, itinerant dentist Edgar “Painless” Parker made a show of extracting teeth and, in England, William Hartley, a.k.a. Sequah, could extract as many as eight teeth per minute!
The first set of porcelain dentures were produced in France in 1788. These were the first successful artificial teeth produced from inorganic matter. In the middle 1800s, cheap Vulcanite rubber was used for dentures. And acrylic resins became widely used when rubber became scarce during World War Two.
Dentists began using cocaine as a local anaesthetic in the late 1800s. Then it was replaced by Novocain in 1905. About the same time, people began using toothbrushes and toothpaste.
In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays (or ultraviolet rays), revolutionising science and medicine. Just a year later the first radio graphs of teeth were made. Tragically though, many people were harmed by the use of X-rays until precautions such as shielding became standard.
In 1906, Charles Land was credited for developing the first porcelain jacket crowns.
Around 1900, fluoride, an actual component in tooth enamel, began being used to fight tooth decay in the United States, and now most of the water in this country’s water supply is fluoridated. Some people think fluoridation may have long-term health effects, though this has never been proven. However, using “too much” has been blamed for staining teeth brown.
In the early decades of the 1900s, teeth whitening became the rage. Unfortunately, many of these applications either didn’t work or were harmful to teeth. In the early 1930s, a whitening agent called Tartar off contained hydrochloric acid, which indeed whitened the teeth but also destroyed tooth enamel in the process.
The first electrically driven dentist drill was produced in 1870. And then in the 1950s the first ultra speed drills came into production, working at upwards of 400,000 rpm. These days, some dentists use laser drills, which provide much greater precision and therefore help prevent degradation of the teeth being repaired.
Nowadays, composite plastic resins, developed for dentistry in the 1980s, can be used to fill teeth rather than gold or amalgam, whose use is much more obvious and not as esthetically pleasing, though the metallic material tends to cost less and lasts longer.
Well, the history of dentistry continues to evolve as we speak. Perhaps one day genetic manipulation or the application of some miracle formula will eliminate tooth decay altogether. But until that time, though the physical pain may not be as great as in the olden days, the pain in ones wallet, so to speak, will nevertheless continue for the foreseeable future.
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