Though false teeth and the fashion of filling the teeth were known even by the ancient Egyptians, the science of dentistry is a modern one. But little care of the teeth was taken in early colonial days, and the advice given for their preservation was very simple:
"If you will keep your teeth from rot, plug, or aking, wash the mouth continually with Juyce of Lemons, and afterwards rub your teeth with a Sage Leaf and Wash your teeth after meat with faire water. To cure Tooth Ach. 1. Take Mastick and chew it in your mouth until it is as soft as Wax, then stop your teeth with it, if hollow, there remaining till it's consumed, and it wil certainly cure you. 2. The tooth of a dead man carried about a man presently suppresses the pains of the Teeth."
I suppose this latter ghoulish cure would not affect the teeth of a woman; if, however, a seventeenth or eighteenth century dame could cure the toothache simply with a plug of mastic, she was much to be envied by her degenerate nineteenth-century sister with her long dentist's bill.
If we can believe Josselyn, writing in 1684, New England women, then as now, lost their teeth at an early age. He speaks of them as "pitifully Tooth shaken." He recommended to relieve their misery a compound of brimstone, gunpowder, and butter, to be "rubbed on the mandible." This colonial remedy is still employed on New England farms. Burnaby, writing in 1759, said that New England dames had universally and even proverbially very indifferent teeth. The Abbé Robin says they were toothless at eighteen or twenty years of age, and attributes this premature disfigurement to tea-drinking and the eating of warm bread.
When we read the composition of the tooth-powders and dentifrices used in early colonial days, we wonder that they had any teeth left to scour. Here is Mr. Ferene's "rare Dentifrice:"
"First take eight ounces of Irios roots, also four ounces of Pomistone, and eight ounces of Cutel Bone, also eight ounces of Mother of Pearl, and eight ounces of Coral, and a pound of Brown Sugar Candy, and a pound of Brick if you desire to make them red; but he did oftener make them white, and then instead of the Brick did take a pound of fine Alabaster; all this being thoroughly beaten and sifted through a fine searse the powder is then ready prepar'd to make up in a past which must be done as follows:
To make the Said Powders into a past.
Take a little Gum Dragant and lay it in steep twelve hours, in Orange flower water or Damask Rose Water; and when it is dissolved take the sweet Gum and grind it on a Marble Stone with the aforesaid Powder, and mixing some crums of white bread it will come into a past, the which you may make Dentifrices, of what shape or fashion you please, but long rowles is the most commodious for your use."
Just fancy scouring your teeth with a commodious roll of cuttle-bone, brick-dust, and pumice-stone!
Another tooth-powder was composed of coral, Portugal snuff, Armenian bole, "ashes of good tobacco which has been burnt," and gum myrrh; and ground up "broken pans"—coarse earthenware might be substituted for the coral.