Today it is hard for us to imagine life without painkillers, medications, and specialists from various fields of medicine. Many people fear visiting the dentist, but let us imagine what such visits looked like in the Middle Ages. Infections, tooth extractions without anesthesia, broken bones, and even death – unfortunately, this was the everyday reality of people of that era.
Activities of Charlatans and Quacks
In the Middle Ages, there were few educated dentists. After the fall of the Roman Empire, most of them fled. Charlatans and poorly educated frauds sniffed out the opportunity. Unfortunately, their insane practices often ended in patients’ deaths.
Quacks traveled from town to town and organized grand spectacles. A planted actor showed residents that treatment could bring relief. Deceived people were enchanted and full of hope, so they agreed to very painful practices.
In the best case, it ended with the extraction of a painful tooth, but unfortunately, infection and even patient death occurred very frequently. By the time this happened, the fraud was already in another town, so he often faced no consequences. In those times, medicines were not available, and diseased teeth were simply extracted. Typically, the consequences of such actions were hemorrhages, broken bones, or injured gums.
Oral hygiene was unpopular and was even considered unnecessary. All this led to serious problems with dentition, which people struggled with enormously at the time.
In the Middle Ages, such importance was not attached to appearance either, so missing teeth were nothing unusual. The first toothbrushes and toothpastes were created much later and were initially made from animal bristles or human hair.
Medieval Remedies
People living in the Middle Ages had a considerable problem. There was a shortage of educated physicians, and a visit to a popular quack was considered a last resort. Complications and pain were feared, so people clutched at everything just to avoid meeting with a traveling fraud. The level of desperation was very high, and that is precisely why people reached for ineffective and dangerous measures.
As early as 1345, the first pharmacy opened in England. Of course, the „miraculous” mixtures that could be obtained there were usually herbs, honey, and other natural remedies. It quickly became apparent that they were not effective, and sometimes they even had completely opposite effects.
In the dental department, painkillers mainly appeared. A popular ailment was also the tooth worm, which medieval people tried to deal with.
In medieval manuscripts, we can find much information about dental diseases, but the tooth worm definitely appears most frequently. It was believed to be the cause of pain and other ailments. People thought it could be gotten rid of using various mixtures.
One method of fighting the tooth worm was to mix wax with acorn flour and henbane seeds, make a candle from it, light it, and fumigate the interior of the mouth with smoke. In this way, tooth worms were supposed to fall out by themselves.
Dubious Quality Methods of Treating Teeth
The biggest dental problem of medieval people was toothache. It resulted, of course, from the lack of oral hygiene and was an extremely popular ailment. Wanting to avoid risky and painful tooth extraction, people opted for various strange treatment methods. One of them was preparing powder from hazel bark and blackthorn wood, making an incision, and sprinkling the wound with the ready mixture.
Of course, these methods usually brought no results, and tooth removal was necessary. For such situations, a solution was also ready. It was believed that there were ways for painless extraction. One of them was roasting newts and beetles. Such prepared powder was rubbed into the gums until the tooth fell out by itself.
If all these stories proved insufficiently surprising, there is one more and certainly not the last. An excellent solution for decayed teeth was… excrement. Raven droppings were colored so that the patient would not realize what the „doctor” was inserting into his tooth. This controversial method was supposed to make the tooth fall out and the pain subside.
Good Advice from Specialists
Not all dentists in the Middle Ages were poorly educated frauds. There were also those who, despite very limited possibilities, offered good advice and helped in difficult situations. They could be found in large cities, but access to them was really only available to the wealthiest. A visit to such a specialist was worth its weight in gold because one could receive professional (for those times) help.
Already then, dentists knew that one should avoid eating very cold and very hot meals simultaneously. They recommended rinsing the oral cavity with special mixtures that soothed gum inflammation. Sometimes a tooth could no longer be saved, and the only way out was to remove it. After such a procedure, they soothed wounds with spices and herbs, because only that was available. It was believed that peppercorns were particularly valuable for problems in the oral cavity.
