And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine
When the International Classification of Diseases first emerged in 1893, it identified 161 separate medical disorders. The tenth edition, published a century later, listed upward of 12,000.
That huge increase suggests one of the main problems facing doctors in former times. Presented with a baffling and unfamiliar set of symptoms, they often had to try to cure diseases that hadn’t even been identified.
Take the case of a Pennsylvanian dentist named W. H. Atkinson, who wrote to Dental Cosmos about a troubling phenomenon he had repeatedly encountered. Over his 40 years in the profession, Atkinson claimed to have treated patients with exploding teeth a number of times.
At first, these patients were crippled by toothaches of extraordinary intensity. The pain was so bad that one man tried in vain to get relief by dunking his head in a nearby spring.
Eventually, in every case, the tooth suddenly seemed to explode. Witnesses heard a loud noise like “a pistol shot” and the tooth immediately burst into fragments. With that, the pain was gone.
Atkinson was puzzled – but he wasn’t the only dentist to encounter the condition. A book from 1874, Pathology and Therapeutics of Dentistry, also tells the story of a woman whose dental pain ended with the explosion of her tooth. Apparently, the force of the rupture almost knocked her over and left her entirely deaf for a period of time.
The dentists who reported these cases each put forward their own explanations – but these rested on ideas that modern dentistry has since discarded. In their place, various other theories have been advanced, some blaming the chemicals used in fillings, others a build-up of electrical charge. But none of these explanations has been widely accepted.
A simpler theory is that the patients were simply exaggerating. Teeth do sometimes break apart, and any unexpected noise in your own mouth must seem surprisingly loud!
But even this theory has its problems; if there was no real explosion, why would nearby witnesses claim to have heard the noise?
It seems the mystery of the exploding teeth must remain unsolved for now. Other mysteries, we’ll find out, have turned out to have rather surprising answers.
The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth (2018) charts some of the most interesting and unpredictable events in the emergence of modern medicine. From tragic operations to bizarre cures, these blinks explore a history of medicine that most doctors would prefer to ignore.
Three hundred years ago, medics often had great difficulty telling the difference between coma and death.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
