Pain Relief
The severe pain of toothache has given rise to many treatments and preparations for thousands of years. Once widely considered to be caused by worms in the teeth, toothaches were treated with preparations made from dried worms, bloody mice, or even henbane. The Talmud proposed consuming garlic and oil, as well as grasshopper eggs, in order to preserve the teeth from pain. By the middle Ages and the Renaissance, toothaches were approached using various concoctions, including a mixture of sparrow droppings and sweet almond oil that was to be administered via the ears. Prayers were sent to Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of dentists and sufferers of toothache (Bennion, 1986). Ambroise Paré advocated treating pain in the teeth through regulation of the humors, the forces that were thought to govern the body, citing extraction as a last resort. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are often associated with both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. While this was a period of questioning assumptions and of greater reliance on empirical observation, it was also an era in which older ideas about tooth worms, humors, and folk cures proved remarkably persistent. Newer cures involved everything from cauterization to clove oil, the latter proving to have lasting implications for nineteenth-century toothache cures (Guerini, 1969). The tooth oils and “specifics” in this exhibit demonstrate the desire to find relief from aching teeth without submitting to the pain and trauma of having them pulled. Containing everything from plant oils to what are, by modern standards, rather startling amounts of alcohol, these remedies sought to provide comfort, and to allow sufferers to keep their teeth.
