Today’s Excessively Tormented Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Like their surgical counterparts, the earliest tools for pulling teeth were derived from those found on the workbenches of medieval craftsmen. The ‘pelican’ – a vicious-looking hooked lever – originated as a device for pressing iron hoops onto barrel staves. Patients sat on a low stool, their head held between the tooth-puller’s knees, while he locked his pelican onto the offending tooth and sought to unseat it. The leading French Renaissance surgeon Ambroise Paré argued, nervously, that surgeons drawing teeth should take care not to inflict serious injuries:
The extraction of a tooth should not be carried out with too much violence, as one risks producing luxation of the jaw or concussion of the brain and the eyes, or even bringing away a portion of the jaw together with the tooth (the author himself has observed this in several cases), not to speak of other serious accidents which may supervene, as, for example, fever, apostema, abundant haemorrhage, and even death.
A particularly intricate Pelican tooth extractor
Tools like the pelican could be slung into a satchel and carried from town to town, and they were taken up by the largest single group of early European dental practitioners. Roman writers satirized the itinerant tooth-pullers called dentatores or edentari, and in medieval Europe they went by a variety of names: ‘toothers’ in England, arracheurs de dents in France, cavadenti in Italy. Tooth-pullers set up shop in town marketplaces and village greens, but they seem to have done most of their business at the great fairs and markets of early modern Europe. Like other quacks, they knew how to put on a show, and the tooth-pullers of the Pont Neuf in Paris became one of the sights of the city, accompanied by dancers, comedians and monkeys, and clad in outrageous costumes that frequently included festoons of extracted teeth.
A creepy tooth-puller!
But for many, even the lurid theatrics of the tooth-pullers could not overcome their fear of extraction, a fear that led them to endure toothaches that must have seemed interminable. In December 1578, when she was forty-five years old, Elizabeth I was ‘so excessively tormented’ by a toothache that for days she could not sleep. Still she refused treatment, until the aged John Aylmer, bishop of London, stepped in and:
Persuaded her that the pain was not so much, and not at all to be dreaded; and to convince her thereof told her, she should have a sensible experience of it in himself, though he were an old man, and had not many teeth to spare; and immediately had the surgeon come over and pull out one of his teeth, perhaps a decayed one, in her majestie’s presence, which accordingly was done: and she was hereby encouraged to submit to the operation herself.
Elizabeth, Excessively Tormented
Culled from: Smile Stealers: The Fine and Foul Art of Dentistry
Morbid Mirth Du Jour!
Sometimes, just when you’re standing on the edge of the precipice, preparing to jump, someone comes along to remind you that there are still good people in this world. Like the mysterious Coffin Man of Lake Burley, Australia. (Thanks to Michael Marano for the link.)
Mystery over man dressed as undertaker paddling coffin across lake
