13 July 2010
When a tooth develops a cavity, the decayed tissue must be
removed. The earliest devices for doing this were picks and
enamel scissors.Then two-edged cutting instruments were
designed, they were twirled in both directions between the
fingers. The father of modern dentistry, the Frenchman
Pierre Fauchard (1678-1761), described an improved drill in
1728. Its rotary movement was powered by catgut twisted
around a cylinder, or by jewelers' bowstrings. A
hand-cranked dental drill bit was patented by John Lewis...
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13 July 2010
Cavities in teeth have been filled since earliest times with
a variety of materials: stone chips, turpentine resin, gum,
metals. Arculanus (Giovanni d' Arcoli) recommended gold-leaf
fillings in 1848. The renowned physician Ambroise Pare
(1510-1590) used lead or cork to fill teeth. In the 1700s,
Pierre Fauchard (1678-1761), the father of modern dentistry,
favored tin foil or lead cylinders. Philip Pfaff
(1715-1767), dentist to Frederick the Great of Prussia
(1712-1786), used gold foil to cap the pulp.
Gold leaf...
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13 July 2010
Crowns (used to replace and cover missing portions of teeth)
and bridges (mountains for artificial teeth attached at
either end to natural teeth) were made of gold and used by
the Etruscans 2,500 years ago. Crowns and bridges fell out
of use during the Middle Ages and were only gradually
rediscovered. The gold shell crown was described by Pierre
Mouton of Paris, France, in 1746, and not patented until
1873, by Beers. The Logan crown, patented in...
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13 July 2010
Fluoride is a chemical found in many substances. In the
human body, fluoride acts to prevent tooth decay by
strengthening tooth enamel and inhibiting the growth of
plaque-forming bacteria. After researchers discovered this
characteristic of fluoride, fluoridation - the process of
adding the fluoride to public water supplies - began.
It all started with Frederick S. McKay, a Colorado Springs,
Colorado, dentist, in the early 1900s. McKay noticed that
many of his patients had brown stains, called "mottled
enamel,"...
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13 July 2010
Replacements for decayed or lost teeth have been produced
for millennia. The Etruscans made skillfully designed false
teeth out of ivory and bone, secured by gold bridgework, as
early as 700 B.C. Unfortunately, this level of
sophistication for false teeth was not regained until the
1800s.
During medieval times, the practice of dentistry was
largely confined to tooth extraction; replacement was seldom
considered. Gaps between teeth were expected, even among the
rich and powerful. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) filled...
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13 July 2010
The gas nitrous oxide was first identified by Joseph
Priestley in 1772. Years later, in the late 1790s, the
British chemist Humphry Davy began experimenting with the
effects of inhaling nitrous oxide. He noted it exhilarating
effects, and the way it made him want to laugh-which gave
the gas its popular name of "laughing gas." Davy published
his findings in 1800, remarking that "As nitrous
oxide...appears capable of destroying pain, it may probably
be used with advantage during...
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13 July 2010
Although teeth-straightening and extraction to improve
alignment of remaining teeth has been practiced since early
times, orthodontics as a science of its own did not really
exits until the 1880s. It had its origins in the first
comprehensive treatise on dentistry, The Surgeon Dentist ,
published in 1728 by Pierre Fauchard (1678-1761>. This
volume devoted an entire chapter to tooth irregularities and
ways to correct them. The French dentist Bourdet followed
Fauchard in 1757 with his book The...
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13 July 2010
Cocaine was widely used as a local anesthetic after Carl
Koller (1857-1944) demonstrated its effectiveness in 1884.
By the end of the 1800s, however, the addictive properties
of cocaine had been recognized. Doctors, realizing they
needed to develop substitutes for cocaine's active
anesthetic ingredient, carefully studied the exact chemical
structure of cocaine. Many of the first synthetic cocaine
products that were developed were to irritating to be of any
practical use. The first successful substitute was Ernest
Fourneau's (1872-1949)...
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13 July 2010
In primitive societies teeth have been extracted with a
chisel-shaped piece of wood held against the tooth and
pounded with a mallet. Early Chinese tooth-pullers used
their fingers, strengthening them for the task by spending
hours pulling nails out of planks. The ancient Greeks used
double-level forceps 300 B.C. while the Romans used forceps
of various designs, including a thin-root forceps, and
pliers to remove small pieces. Abulcasis (963-1013), an Arab
surgeon from Spain, illustrated a number of...
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13 July 2010
The earliest toothbrushes were simply small sticks,
eventually mashed at one end to increase their cleaning
surface. Ancient Roman patricians employed special slaves to
clean their teeth. Toothbrushing formed part of some ancient
religious observances. The bristle brush was probably
invented by Chinese; it came to Europe during the
seventeenth century and soon was widely used. French
dentists, who were the most advanced in Europe at the time,
advocated the use of tooth-brushes in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth...
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