He’s getting them treated by a dentist, but what did non-wealthy people do in the Middle Ages or before? It’s pretty hard to pull an adult’s tooth without special pliers, and I doubt they were available to most peasants. I know they didn’t eat a lot of sugar like we do today, but they also didn’t have much of a clue about flossing and brushing, let alone flouride toothpaste, so there must have been a lot of bad teeth.
So what happens if a tooth goes bad and you can’t get it pulled? If it’s rotten, trying to knock it out with a hammer or something would just break it off and make things worse. And if you just let it rot away by itself, wouldn’t that take years, and wouldn’t you be in constant agony for those years?
Dying, eating a lot of gruel and soft boiled foods. You can live decades with a tooth broken off at the gumline, although it isn’t pleasant, it’s not life threatening unless it becomes infected.
You can also dig out a bad tooth with a flint blade, or if it’s still got enough to grab onto, tie a piece of sinew around it and yank it out by the root.
Goldenseal, garlic, echinacea and other herbs are antibacterial enough to get rid of minor tooth infections. Myrrh, white oak bark and comfrey have a long history of being used to treat gum and tooth infections. Ground cloves or clove oil have been used to reduce tooth pain for centuries, at least. Alcohol has been around as long as civilization, and getting sloshed helps with pain. Poppy infused wine *really *helps with pain!
Living with broken teeth, missing teeth and frequent infections isn’t a thing of the past, sadly. It’s very much a thing of the present when you work with poor people right here in the US. Medicaid doesn’t do much dental for adults.
They could get the tooth pulled by a barber-surgeon, but yeah, people did die of abcessed teeth on a regular basis. This unfortunate young man at Jamestown, for example, would have died a slower and more painful death if an arrow hadn’t gotten him first.
As above, over time, the increase in longevity in most societies is in part explained by the improvement in medical and dental science. That affects peoples’ behavior, which prevents many disorders, as well as the treatment they receive when things go wrong.
In many cases it is difficult to tell. Egypt had a rich tradition of dental science and a huge number of mummies show evidence of dental treatment. But it’s not clear whether the dental treatments were administered in life or were post-mortem cosmetics.
The classic cite is an article on Egyptian dentistry from 1967. This is an example of more recent work on the subject. The researchers examined a Ptolemaic-era mummy of a man who probably died from his aggravated dental problems.
If you go far enough back, prior to grain consumption, bad teeth weren’t a big problem. On an ideal diet, humans’ teeth are generally in more-or-less functional shape without much dental care. There can be exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.
In fact, primitive groups of people all over the world, even today, often have excellent dental health, without any dentists whatsoever. Of course, that changes if they switch away from their traditional diets that they’ve been eating for tens of thousands of years.
Even if it was in life, I would think you had to be in the upper classes to be mummified. I don’t doubt that rich people have had access to at least crude dentistry in civilized areas, but I’m wondering about the peasants. I guess it’s possible that each village had one pair of pliers, but I still have this mental picture of poor people, who were “lucky” enough to find some honeycomb or sugar cane or something, going through years of agony as their teeth rot away.
Several responses have mentioned infections. Is that the normal course of tooth decay — that it will cause a systemic infection that goes far beyond the tooth itself?
Tooth decay was not common because people ate very little sugar. The bigger problem was the fact that flour was ground very coarsely and, at least in Egypt, everything was full of sand. Eating bread was like filing away your teeth. Ordinary wear and tear left plenty of room for infection, which could easily spread.
Mummification was not just for the fabulously wealthy. We have tens of thousands of mummies of peoples’ pets, sacred crocodiles, young children, etc. It was a pretty standard expense for a large proportion of people.
Keep in mind that in Egypt simply burying a body in sand away from where the Nile flooded was sufficient to provide a certain level of mummification. The poor always had access to that level of body preservation, even if not the elaborate rituals and preparations of the rich and powerful.
The link I provided to above mentions the method some used for tooth extraction. Place a piece of wood on the tooth to be removed and strike it with a hammer like object till the tooth loosens. So as long as the tooth was not broken off or too far gone above the gum line, and assuming the impact did not break it off, there seemed to be at least some method for the poor to do a emergency extraction.
I read of a treatment from only, I think, a couple hundred years ago: a rotting tooth would have bird dung packed over it again and again until it fell out. The point was to speed through the painful rotting phase.
As a long standing Dentistphobe i can tell you that pain from a molar aches for two weeks then dies, then spends some years falling apart. Clove oil kills the pain very effectively though.
There were also a variety of embalming and mummification treatments. Not everyone got the full monty with a gold death mask.
But here’s a really nice-looking cat mummy. One of the most important caches of papyrus documents ever found was in crocodile mummies in Tebtunis. Throwaway documents were used in a cheap mummification process. In this case, 31 mummtes (out of about 1000) yielded thousands of papyri. Here is a nice specimen.
The croc mummies in Tebtunis are a great story. Tebtunis was excavated by the great English papyrologists Grenfell and Hunt. They had spent a good deal of time and money digging, and all they found were crocodile mummies. One of them (I forget which) was so angry at finding another worthless fucking mummy that he hurled it across the tomb. It hit the wall and burst open like a pinata full of papyrus documents. They opened all of the mummies more carefully and found thousands more papyri.
So what you’re saying is that they stuffed the crocodiles with the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of old newspapers, sort of like using crumpled paper as a packing material?
Almost. The process is called cartonnage. Thousands of papyri have been recovered from mummy wrappings, including the previously lost Constitution of Athens by Aristotle.