Before Dentists Were Doctors TOOTH WORMS, BARBERS, AND THE ROCKY ROAD TO DENTAL SCIENCE
They also cut hair and performed minor surgeries like lancing boils and removing blemishes.
Today, being a dentist, hygienist, or assistant requires years of schooling, training, exams, licensing, and insurance. But while experts resembling today’s dental teams have long practiced medicine, dentistry itself wasn’t always that way. In fact, many “dentists” before the 1900s were self-taught, self-proclaimed, and dubiously qualified for their work! In ancient times, dentistry was limited to a few basic procedures, the most advanced of which would have been fillings of silver and gold. While common, those procedures and the physicians who offered them were not usually available to the common people. For the everyday folk, extractions were the solution to dental problems, often after already drilling into a painful tooth to “let out the tooth worm.” You see, they believed worms dug into teeth and caused pain — not realizing that the thin, wormlike tissue emerging from a drilled tooth was, in fact, a piece of the patient! Things began to change when dental textbooks and manuals first emerged. Now, anybody who had a toolbox (and the ability to read) could claim to be a dentist — and many did, seeking a better life than farming or other trades. These traveling “barbers”were not usually educated at physicians’ colleges (which still taught the most advanced dentistry of the time) and often traveled around to offer their services.
In the 1700s, Pierre Fauchard and others modernized dentistry with new tools and procedures, which was the beginning of a regulated dental profession based on science. The barber-dentists moved on to the NewWorld, where their mobile business model allowed them to reach large sections of a spread-out population — and, for the charlatans, to get out of dodge when their victims caught on! By the 19th century, the age of the barber was over in Europe, but on the ever-moving American frontier, the profession stayed alive and well until modern regulations put them out of business. It’s hard to imagine, but until the modern era, most people could expect tooth loss starting at a young age; even rich people were affected, like George Washington with his famously horrible dentures. Decay and injury were common, and letting a “barber” work on you was better than enduring the debilitating pain of having an aggravated cavity. It makes us grateful for modern flossing and brushing — and that we have access to regulated, educated dental professionals who represent the long line of brilliant, caring visionaries like Pierre Fauchard and not the charlatans who had pliers and dental wagons!
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