by Jon Scieszka
Public tooth-pulling (and occasional pounding) was a thriving business for hundreds of years and lasted well into the nineteenth century. There weren’t many alternatives, especially away from large cities, plus these men were very skilled at self-advertising. During the mid-1770s, a short, bearded fellow named Martin van Butchell rode around London on a white horse painted with purple polka dots. He would make frequent stops to proclaim his guaranteed method of pain-free extraction and ply his trade from the saddle. When his wife died, he saw an opportunity he simply couldn’t resist. He had his wife embalmed and placed her in a large, glass case in the hallway of their home. Between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. visitors could drop in to be introduced to the deceased Mrs. Van Butchell and, if desired, have a tooth pulled. On Sundays both Mr. and Mrs. Van Butchell rested after their long week of work.
During this golden era of tooth pulling, the practitioners—whether a physician-dentist, a barber or butcher, traveling tooth-drawer, or a local quack—managed to kill off enough people to make Attila the Hun look like a gentle sort of bloke. During one week in London in 1665, the Bill of Mortality lists 111 deaths caused by dental procedures gone wrong, a full 10 percent of everyone who checked out that week.
The amazing kill ratio prompted many negative responses. As early as AD 1215, Pope Innocent III suggested that real physicians leave dental work to the riffraff—“barbers, executioners, and pig castrators.”
Around the same time, physicians throughout Europe began organizing guilds to promote their professions. One of the first rules implemented by a Paris guild told physicians that the people who claimed to be dentists were scum and little better than criminals, adding that guild members who worked on a patient’s teeth or gums would be expelled.
These insults didn’t go unanswered. Barber-dentists organized their own guilds in order to clean up their tarnished reputations. The Guild of Barbers in France suggested in 1210 that members remove the buckets of human blood that were commonly left in a shop’s front window to advertise the barber’s skill at bloodletting. Not to be denied a way to promote themselves, barbers soon began displaying poles with red-and-white stripes. The stripes represented the blood-soaked bandages resulting from tooth extractions.
Oddly enough, the guilds did promote a more careful approach to dentistry, warning against experimental techniques and recommending ones that seemed to work or were at least less painful and life threatening. By the mid-nineteenth century, schools were established to teach accepted dental care and do research on ways to make procedures more efficient and safe. New and safer amalgams were concocted that didn’t need to be red-hot when poured into a cavity. Hand drills were replaced by foot-powered drills that eventually (in 1870) gave way to the first electrically driven drill. And finally, after thousands of years of excruciating pain, ether and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) came into general use by the mid-nineteenth century.
The age of modern dentistry was born, when truly pain-free teeth-and-gum surgery could be performed and the patients had a fairly good chance of surviving the procedure.
But the damage had been done to the human psyche. My theory is that thousands of years of agonizing dental procedures, buckets of gore, and thousands of ghastly, grisly experiments have imprinted us with a reflexive fear of the dentist, no matter how nice he or she might be.
When I went to the dentist for the second time, I was a little nervous. I had brushed my teeth every day, but I didn’t floss to get out decaying bits of food. In addition, I loved to chew ice cubes and I drank great quantities of Pepsi-Cola (so much that a concerned deli owner once told me, “You know, this stuff is so corrosive, it can be used to clean bricks!”). Still, without screaming and running away, I opened my mouth and let the dentist look inside.
He poked around with one of those pointy instruments and made little grunting sounds that implied concern. He studied the X-rays of my teeth several times and seemed perplexed. When he went to get his partner, I was truly worried.
His partner looked into my mouth and seemed startled and confused. I had a saliva-sucking device hanging in my mouth, but I managed to ask, “Ith thar shomtin wong?” I braced for horrible news that would take me down the road to bloody, life-threatening dental surgery.
Both dentists looked puzzled at first. Then my dentist said, “There’s nothing wrong. And knowing your history, I can’t explain it. You have no cavities at all.”
It turns out I have remarkably hard teeth (knock on wood) and have had very few dental problems. Even so, my heart rate goes up and I get the cold sweats every time a dentist leans in and says, “Open wide, Mr. Murphy. This won’t hurt a bit.”
Further Reading
I told a friend that I was writing this brief history of dentistry. He yawned and nearly fell asleep, even though I swore it wouldn’t be boring. But that’s the sort of respect dental history gets (or doesn’t get). I think the history of tooth care is fascinating and horrifying at the same time. If you’re interested, I’ve listed below some avenues of internet search and books that you can explore. It’s the sort of history you can really sink your teeth into!
I was going to list some specific websites to check out but realized that general internet searches turn up many more interesting sites (including ones with visual images). Try out the phrases below and see what you find:
9000 Year Old Dentistry
6500 Year Old Dental Work
Prehistoric Stone Dental Drills
Ancient Egyptian Dental Care
Ancient Greek Dentistry
Ancient Roman Dentistry
History of Toothpicks
History of Gargling for Bad Breath
History of Braces
History of Dental Fillings
History of Tooth Repairs
Medieval Tooth Pullers
Traveling Tooth Pullers
Martin van Butchell
And here are some books worth looking at:
Bremmer, M. D. K. The Story of Dentistry from the Dawn of Civilization to the Present. Brooklyn, NY: Dental Items of Interest Publishing, 1954.
Carter, Joseph G., and Carter, Bill. Folk Dentistry: A Cultural Evolution of Folk Remedies for Toothache. Chapel Hill, NC: Self-Published.
Dobson, Jessie. Barbers and Barber Surgeons of London. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Geshwind, Max. “Wig-Maker, Barber, Bleeder and Tooth-Drawer,” Journal of the History of Dentistry 44, no. 3 (November 1996).
Guerini, Vincinzo. A History of Dentistry from the Most Ancient Times Until the End of the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1909.
Hoffman-Axthelm, Walter. History of Dentistry. Chicago: Quintessence Publishing, 1981.
Holbrook, Stewart H. The Golden Age of Quackery. New York: Macmillan, 1959.
Lufkin, Arthur. A History of Dentistry, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1948.
Proskauer, Curt, and Witt, Fritz H. Pictorial History of Dentistry. Koln, Germany: M Du Mont Schaubert, 1995.
Ring, Malvin E. Dentistry: An Illustrated History. New York: Harry S. Abrams, 1985.
Rubin, J. G. Dental Phobia and Anxiety. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1988.
Thompson, Charles J. S. The Quacks of Old London. New York: Brentano’s, 1928.
A PACK OF BROTHERS
BY THANHHA LAI
Growing up in Vietnam, I yearned to be a boy. Not a tomboy but an actual screaming, bleeding, tadpole-catching, forever-sweating boy. I mingled with six of them up close, daily. Six brothers. You read right, six! All older, all cooler, all floating around in an orbit of fun. Or so it seemed to me: the youngest, the last to attend school, the last to get a word in, the last to go to the open market alone, where snacks were guaranteed.
I didn’t want to be just any boy, but a boy in my brothers’ pack. They weren’t individuals as much as a loud, roving whirl of privileges. I wanted in. They wanted me to disappear.
I did have two sisters. One was the oldest of us all, so she didn’t count;
the other just two years older and paired as my pseudo twin. We wore matching outfits, had identical bowl-shaped haircuts, ate exactly the same food. But somehow she was so happy to be a girl. She had zero desire to snare lizards (those little suckers were fast) or wade into a pond to find betta fighting fish (there were leeches) or even take a monsoon bath (the raindrops would spear your face like arrows). My sis excelled at sewing doll clothes, molding tiny clay pots, washing vegetables, playing school. As in, she would play the teacher giving me brain-wrenching math equations. Enough said.
The pack wasn’t mean. They just had longer legs and stronger arms and thus loathed to have a stumpy, round-faced baby sister trailing them. In my family the older was responsible for the younger. Thus my brothers had to protect me from the harsh sun, marauding mosquitoes, mud holes, mean ducks, and all other tropical dangers.
They were stuck with me because my mother worked. She would have preferred to stay home and mold me into an ideal girl, but my father was “missing in action,” meaning the opposite side in the war had captured him. My father remains missing in action. I was one when my father disappeared, so I didn’t know him to miss him. But all my life, I’ve tried to imagine the shock my mother must have felt. My parents had known each other since they were children.
With my father gone, my mother and oldest sister worked. That left my brothers to feed me lunch, help me with homework, and keep me halfway clean. Back then I failed to understand that they had crossed the gender line to care for me. Instead I fumed at the injustice of being a girl in a world where boys had all the fun.
That world was in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a green and humid country known for its beaches, mountains, fruit, and, unfortunately, war. My family lived in Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City), the congested capital in the south. It was crowded like New York City, but as a kid I just stayed in my neighborhood and preoccupied myself with school, the open market, and my brothers.
In my experience, war wasn’t scary. I lived inside a country at war, but I didn’t worry about it. Bombs were not exploding above me, and people were not running around screaming. I kinda knew soldiers were fighting in some other parts of the country, and that someday tanks and guns might reach Saigon, but mostly I concerned myself with immediate injustices, like why couldn’t a girl plow into objects and get scars? Or why couldn’t she gobble down boiled jackfruit seeds to induce nuclear-level farts?
Every second my brothers had to watch me, it was one more second away from soccer time, lizard time, soccer time, fish-fighting time, cricket time, and soccer time. Theirs was a well-worn soccer ball I was not allowed to touch. Not to worry. I didn’t even like soccer, much less a dirty, smelly ball. Why would anyone want to bounce it off his head? Or kick it endlessly from one goal to another? I just wanted to watch them. My joy, their burden.
Still, nobody whined “It’s not fair” in Vietnam. That was stating the obvious. The world wasn’t supposed to be fair, but you could tweak it in your favor. This sort of heavy maneuvering my brothers perfected. If they had to care for me and my twinlike sister, they would do so on their terms. My sister was easy. They would tell her to stay home and play with dolls, and she stayed and played with dolls. They would tell me to stay, and I went into sly mode. Or I thought I was sly. They saw me hiding and following them, every time.
My brothers couldn’t get rid of me, so they made the handling of me a little more in their favor.
Naps
Vietnam roasted in the afternoons, so the whole country napped. Literally. Stores closed; traffic thinned out; workers and younger students went home to rest. People usually got up at dawn, did their thing, and then napped, which revived them for the softer evening hours.
My brothers were supposed to nap too. But anyone looking at their sinewy, twitchy limbs would know they could not endure two hours of heat and stillness. I was five, just starting morning kindergarten. After lunch I napped. My brothers had a strict schedule as to who was responsible for my rest each weekday. Now, looking back, all six of my brothers have congealed into one unit. I have no idea who said or did any one thing, except that one of them was responsible.
Their routine involved tying me to a hammock hooked to posts in the middle of the living area, leaving plenty of swing space. Tying me insured that I would not fall out. Every young kid napped on a hammock in Vietnam and, most likely, everyone with brothers tied them in.
My nap helper of the day would sing three songs. After these three ear-piercing renditions, I was supposed to be asleep.
But . . .
“Aren’t you going to nap?” I asked.
“I have to make sure you’re asleep first.” His eyes shifted to the courtyard, where no doubt my other antsy brothers were head-butting their beloved, smelly soccer ball.
“When I hear you snore, I’ll go to sleep,” I offered.
“You sleep.”
“You first.”
“One more song, then be asleep.”
He sang, swinging me high, really high, almost touching-the-ceiling high. I clutched the rope tying me to the hammock, thus to life. Near the end of the fourth song, he was spitting out the lyrics.
Then silence, except for footsteps retreating from the courtyard. Definitely more than one set of feet. But what could I have done? Roped in, still whipped into the air from momentum, I lay with eyes squeezed to fight against a flip-floppy stomach. I fell asleep against my will.
Afternoon Snacks
The best part of taking a nap was waking up to a snack. Vietnam had as many kinds of snacks as it had people, and it seemed every snack was concocted from mung beans and coconut milk or was eaten fresh from the earth. My favorite was sugarcane. The cane peddler would have spent the morning chopping down each stalk, careful to wear long sleeves because the serrated leaves slash through skin like tiny swords. He’d have stripped each long stalk of its hard shell, exposing chewable, juicy flesh. Tasteless knots divided each stalk into increments. The knots had to be chopped off, leaving blocks that were one inch around and five inches tall. These were chopped further into one-inch cubes, only to be further split like wood into triangular pieces that would fit in a child’s mouth. Portioned into little plastic bags, these pieces sat on ice, waiting for children to wake from their naps.
My brothers always selected the snack of the day and paid for it with the endless coins my mother left in a clear vase. Each afternoon I would beg for iced sugarcane cubes.
If I truly had been annoying, like not sleeping after three songs, they inevitably chose jackfruit for its majestic seeds and as a reminder of my outsider status. I was allowed only the yellow flesh, sweet and floral but meaningless. If I had been medium annoying, like begging for my mother’s blouse to hug, the choice might have been pouches of sweet beans and fresh-squeezed coconut milk. It tasted okay. Once in a while, because my mother specifically left instructions to buy sugarcane cubes, my brothers would call to our door the old man with a pushcart that leaked ice water and transported bags of miracle.
Ah, to press that cold, cold bag to my sweaty nape. That alone would have been a treat. But get this, I got to eat the cubes. Not actually eat but chew the pulp and suck out its sweetness. When done right, I spat out nothing but chomped fiber.
In our family the youngest got to choose her share first. I picked up each bag, counting the triangles and weighing their sugary potential. My brothers banged on the table. My sister simply waited her turn.
Finally I chose. Ah, to pop the first freezing triangle into my mouth.
We were six boys and three girls, thus nine bags. My oldest sister, usually home for a nap, said snacking was beneath her. So the first to finish his or her share snatched the extra. My twinsy sister called the game unbecoming. Not me. I chewed as fast as I could, but my mouth was the smallest in the house. Inevitably one of my brothers would win by cheating. The trick called for half-chewing pieces in the first bag, grabbing the extra bag, then going back for a thorough sucking of every sweet drop in the first
and a leisure contemplation of the second.
I never won, but at least I was in the game.
Haircut
In class girls sat on one side and boys on the other. At recess boys played soccer and girls jumped rope. For art boys painted and girls embroidered. I jumped rope with the best of them and sewed floral designs on many a handkerchief. I had no interest in the boys in uniforms at school. Unlike my brothers, fun was not stamped on them.
One day one of my brothers acquired a pair of scissors. Not any old scissors but one with comblike teeth that cut zigzaggy patterns.
They tried the new toy on one another. Their crewcuts, though, provided no shock value when snipped further. They needed long hair. My oldest sister, who had a glossy waterfall down her back, proved untouchable. She pinched hard, with long nails. My pseudo twin had always been so lovely, my brothers just couldn’t touch her bowl-shaped page.
That left my bowl-shaped page.
A page was a bob, except shorter and rounder and uglier. In a fair universe, such a haircut would equal ample payback for all the times I sneaked out and followed the pack. And yet the world was not fair.
Two brothers dragged me to a chair. Two more held down my claws and kicks. One clamped shut my bites. That left one to snip. My hair fell in different lengths: long, short, long, short.
“That doesn’t look right,” one brother said.
“Cut a little more,” another helped out.
“Now that side is not right,” singsonged yet a third voice.
More clips. The end result made my mother scream when she got home.
The next day in class, the girls pushed me over to the boys’ side. The boys scoffed and pushed me back. I then sat way in the back behind every single classmate. The day after that, I wore a hat.