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We’ll bet the early history of dental care and dentists in the United States is far more interesting that you would have guessed, filled with famous names and genius innovations. While the technology and discoveries that led to modern dentistry happened all over the world, many notable firsts took place in the United States.
While Paul Revere is known best as a silversmith and for his famous ride during the Revolutionary War, he also briefly offered services as a dentist. He was also responsible for the first known case of using dental forensics to identify a body. After the Battle of Breed’s Hill in Boston, Revere confirmed the identity of his friend Dr. Joseph Warren by the dental bridge he had constructed for him.
When George Washington was serving as the first U.S. president, American dentist John Greenwood crafted him a set of false teeth from hippopotamus ivory, gold wire, brass and human teeth. Contrary to legend, none of Washington’s sets of dentures were made of wood. Several of his sets of false teeth still exist today and are on display at museums near his home.
Horace Hayden and Chapin Harris established the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the first dental school in the world. This school is also the first to offer the Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) degree, which is later adopted by other institutions. The College later became part of the University of Maryland. The Dentariae Medicinae Doctorae (DMD) degree was later established by Harvard University, leading to lots of confusion over the two names for what is essentially the same dental degree!
The invention of metal tube packaging makes at home oral hygiene more convenient than ever. Toothpaste can now be sold pre-mixed in a squeezable tube. Before this, people had to mix powder with water to make their own paste whenever they cleaned their teeth.
Just a year after William Roentgen, a German physicist, discovers x-rays, an American dentist named C. Edmond Kells takes a dental x-ray of a living patient for the first time. X-rays go on to become one of dentistry’s most powerful tools for diagnosis and treatment planning.
Ancient Sumerian people believe cavities and tooth decay are caused by “tooth worms”. This belief persisted for centuries and in many different cultures. Treatments included trying to lure out the worm with honey and magic spells and potions.
The inscription on the tomb of an Egyptian scribe named Hesy-Re is the first known reference to someone as a dental practitioner. He is honored as “the greatest of those who deal with teeth, and of physicians.”
Both Aristotle and Hippocrates wrote about dentistry. They mention identifying the pattern in which adult teeth come in, stabilizing the teeth and jaw with wire, and methods for tooth extraction.
An ancient Chinese medical text includes an early mention of silver fillings. The text refers to a silver paste, which would have been quite similar to the amalgam used in modern dentistry.
If you had a toothache in the middle ages, you’d go to your barber. During this era, barbers dealt with far more than just hair and were practically medical professionals. Extracting teeth was a normal and accepted part of their job description.
In Germany, a book titled Little Medicinal Book for All Kinds of Diseases and Infirmities of the Teeth by Artzney Buchlein is the first known book exclusively about dental medicine. Topics addressed include placing gold fillings, tooth extraction and oral hygiene.
French surgeon Pierre Fauchard publishes The Surgeon Dentist, A Treatise on Teeth, the first comprehensive guide to dental care ever written. He is considered the Father of Modern Dentistry because many of the book’s ideas regarding oral anatomy, restoring teeth and creating dentures are the basis of the practice of dentistry moving forward.
As dental professionals, our ultimate goal is for every one of our patients to live their whole lives without losing their teeth. However, in the unfortunate situation that a patient is missing their teeth, dentures are a great solution to return a smile to beauty and function. Dentures have a long and legendary history, and modern technology has made today’s dentures even more natural-looking and customized than ever before.
The earliest examples of dentures appeared in the 7th Century B.C. The ancient Etruscans used a combination of gold wire and human and animal teeth to create these early dentures. By the 5th Century B.C., ancient Romans were creating similar dentures. Wooden dentures appeared in Japan in the early 1500s. These dentures were similar to modern dentures in that they were carefully carved to match the shape of a person’s mouth. The Japanese later made dentures from stone, ivory and animal horn in addition to wood.
The number of people who need dentures has grown pretty quickly over the last few hundred years. As access to sugar and tobacco increased, mostly because of large sugar cane and tobacco plantations in the Americas, tooth decay became more common and widespread. The more people ate sugar and smoked, the more their teeth fell out. It makes sense that modern dentistry started to be developed around the same time.
Affordable dentures are a recent thing. For most of the history of dentures, they were an item reserved for the upper classes. The materials and expertise required to make them made dentures very expensive.
Contrary to popular belief, the first U.S. President, George Washington, did not have dentures made of wood. His dentures were made from carved hippopotamus ivory, gold wire, and human teeth. In fact, most dentures in the 1700s and 1800s were made with other people’s teeth, which had either been collected from bodies on battlefields or even stolen from graves! Thankfully, early dentists started developing porcelain dentures, which eventually eliminated the need to take teeth from the dead or those down on their luck.
Today, dentures are made from a specialized form of acrylic (a kind of durable, hard plastic) that can be made to look just like natural teeth and gums. While most dentures are held in place by friction/suction or adhesives, there are now dentures that can be held in place by mini dental implants. These implant-supported dentures are more secure and can even help prevent tooth-loss-related bone loss. The invention of dental implants in the last century also means that many people who might have gotten dentures in the past are replacing their teeth entirely with permanent prosthetic teeth, complete with a titanium tooth root.
We hope this history of dentures has made you grateful for the advances in modern dentistry. We certainly are!
Perhaps the earliest example of dental implants were seashells found in the jaw of an ancient Mayan skeleton from 1,300 years ago. While the Mayans were known for their surprisingly advanced dental knowledge, their seashell solution is a long way from today’s modern dental implants. And like many amazing, world-changing inventions, dental implants discovered practically by mistake.
It all started in Sweden in 1952. An orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Per-Ingvar Branemark conducted an experiment studying bone healing and blood flow that involved placing titanium rods in the legs of rabbits. At the end of his months-long experiment, he went to remove the rods from the rabbits’ legs and discovered they were totally fixed in place. The bone had fused to the titanium and grown around it.
This was remarkable because the human body (and the rabbit body for that matter) usually doesn’t like foreign objects being placed inside it. The body views the object as a threat and rejects it. Just think about how irritated and painful your skin becomes when you get a splinter.
Following his discovery, Dr. Branemark coined the term “osseointegration” to describe the process of bone adhering to metal. (“Osseo” comes from the Latin word for bone.) Using titanium as anchors for replacement teeth was on of the first applications that Dr. Branemark thought of for his discovery. He placed the first implants in a dental patient in the mid-1960s, however, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the use of titanium implants became accepted by the rest of the medical and dental community.
Since then, the technology has continued to advance as scientists and dentists strive create better versions of dental implants. Improvements have been made to the materials, shapes and installation techniques of dental implants, leading to shorter healing times and making the procedure available to a wider range of patients.
The difference between traditional techniques of tooth replacement and dental implants is like the difference between a peg leg and a high-tech bionic prosthetic leg. The development of dental implants allowed dentists, for the first time, to truly replace a tooth. Because implants have a root and a crown structure just like a real tooth, they function just like a real tooth and can last for decades, unlike bridges and dentures which often need to be adjusted and replaced.
While many patients have only heard of the dental implants procedure within the last few years, the truth is that the concept of dental implants has been around for centuries, and modern dental implants have been around for over 60 years. The success of implants in restoring missing teeth to patients’ mouths truly makes it feel like we’re in a golden age of dentistry. Dentists the world over are grateful to have this amazing technology at their disposal to restore patients’ smiles.
