I did a quick Google seach on impacted teeth and learned that teeth can decay even when they’re below the gum line, and that this decay can spread to the jawbone and surrounding tissues, which sounds pretty nasty. What exactly would cause death?
What medical developments happened in the nineteenth century to reduce the risk of death? How common was this? I thought impacted wisdom teeth were pretty common–I had four. Are there any famous people who died of impacted teeth?
Sorry to include so many questions, but this really has my curiousity going.
Just a WAG, but it seems to me that any infection of the jaw only has a short distance to travel before it gets to the brain. Enflammed brain can’t be a good thing.
I’m guessin’ (IANAD) that it’s the infection. I don’t know that it would be fatal 100% of the time, but I can see it killing a lot of people.
A friend of mine (see, we’re at FOAF level already . . . ) had a botched wisdom-tooth extraction. He ended up with a low-grade infection that persisted for years, undiagnosed. He felt sick, achey, and fatigued all the time and had lots of digestive problems. He was misdiagnosed as lactose intolerant, among other things. Basically, his whole system was out of whack. Once he got an accurate diagnosis, it took a boatload of antibiotics to set him right again.
In the olden days, no antibiotics. If you got a bad bacterial infection, either your body managed to fight it off, or you got sicker and sicker until you died.
Makes you glad to live in the 21st century, don’ it?
It was in the introduction to the chapter on language and communication. The basic point is that
I’ve done a little more web-searching that I probably should have done before my OP. :o
This site http://www.dental-site.itgo.com/ancientpeople.htm#top indicates that death from dental disease was one of the more common causes of death until about 1800. From information elsewhere on the site (Western Dentistry 1750-1868) it looks like organized and regulated instruction in dentistry began in the 1820’s and 1830’s. I surmise that this rise of dental colleges probably led to better techniques of surgical extraction.
So it’s probably the infection that kills ya, and better dentristry probably lessened the death rate. I’m still curious about references dental woes and/or deaths in contemporary literature or historical figures.
I do know that it isn’t at all uncommon to find skulls in cementarys where big chunks of jaw were eaten away by infection. Sometimes people survived this (signs of healing) and sometimes they didn’t. I think I would want to die, and quickly! Ancient people did practice extraction, as they learned pretty quick that if you got the infected tooth out there was at least a fighting chance that your body could fight off the remaining infection.I suspect that sespis, not inflamation of the brain, would usually be the secondary infection that lead to death, but I am not a medical anything. That is how most chonic infections kill you.
With chonic jaw pain, I expect a reduced/poor diet would exacerbate illness
if not actually lead to malnutrition and/or starvation. Didn’t Queen Elizabeth I
have similar troubles? I’m not sure that’s what actually carried her off though.
I can keenly recall how desperately I prayed for my own death when I had an abcessed tooth. I can’t imagine living with such pain, as people must have back then.
And remeber, Cranky, they didn’t even have ASPRIN, let alone ibuprophin or lortabs . . .the introduction of opaites must truly have seemed like a gift from God to peoples who had all sorts of chonic untreatable conditions.