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Inside This Issue
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Fascinating Facts About Our First President
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Snooze Your Way to Self-Care
A Smooth Surgical Success
Help for a Healthy Glow
Vegan Greek Sheet Pan Dinner
The Unsolved Mystery of the Exploding Teeth
DENTAL DETONATIONS FROM THE PAST The Bizarre History of the Bursting Teeth
People love unsolved mysteries, as shown by the steady stream of new podcasts and TV shows about cold cases. Now, to the annals of mysteries like “Who invented Bitcoin?” or “What really happened to Amelia Earhart?” add this riddle for the ages:
woman reported that one of her canine teeth spontaneously split open with “a sudden sharp report,” again leading to instant relief, the article said.
Correspondence published in the British Dental Journal told of similar cases, including one recorded in 1871 by a different American dentist. He reported treating a woman whose molar “bursted (sic) with a concussion and report that well-nigh knocked her over” with a sound loud enough to deafen her for a few days, the correspondence said. The cause of these dental detonations isn’t clear. The Pennsylvania dentist who reported the three initial cases suspected that a buildup of gas within the teeth may have triggered the eruptions, but modern experts say that notion arises from a misunderstanding of what causes tooth decay at that time. Some suggest that a mixture of metals in dental fillings may have caused a buildup of pressure, but there is little evidence to support that hunch. Or, the patients may simply have been exaggerating their symptoms.
What caused the mystery of the exploding teeth?
About a half dozen times during the 19th century, people were beset by agonizing dental pain followed by an explosion of a tooth, according to scientific journal articles reported by the BBC. In the first case, a clergyman in 1817 reported an ache in a canine tooth so intense as to drive him wild, according to a Pennsylvania dentist’s journal article. The reverend ran around trying to escape the pain, drilling his head into the ground and immersing it in a cold spring, to no avail. “All at once, a sharp crack, like a pistol shot, burst his tooth to fragments, giving him instant relief,” the article said. In another case, a woman a few miles away suffered severe pain in a tooth that ended “by bursting with report, giving immediate relief,” the dentist wrote. In a third case, in 1855, a
But without other explanations, the mystery of the exploding teeth remains unsolved.
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