Wilhelm Fabry.
Arnauld Gilles, a Frenchman, in the year 1622, published in Paris a work whose curious title we will here note: The flower of the remedies against toothache.[336] We know nothing else about this publication, which, however, to judge from its title, cannot be other than a mere compilation.
Dupont, another Frenchman, in 1633, published an important pamphlet, which I have, unfortunately, not been able to see. I can, therefore, only quote what Sprengel says of it.[337] Dupont recommends, in cases of obstinate toothache, the extraction and immediate replantation of the tooth; which, he says, becomes quite firm again, but will no more cause any pain. In confirmation of this, Denis Pomaret related, a little later, a case in which a healthy tooth having been pulled out by mistake, and immediately put back into the socket and treated with astringent remedies, became perfectly firm again.[338]
Although Abulcasis and Ambroise Paré had already recommended the replantation of teeth, the loss of which had been caused by trauma, and although Peter Foreest had already made known as a result of his own personal experience that the luxation (not, however, complete extraction) of a tooth and its successive replantation is capable of causing toothache to cease, nevertheless, we must recognize that the merit of having elevated replantation in non-traumatic cases to a special method of cure must be attributed to Dupont.
Wilhelm Fabry (1560 to 1634), a German, and native of the small town of Hilden near Cologne, better known by his Latin name of Fabricius Hildanus, was chief doctor to the city of Berne, and acquired great fame as well by his extraordinary professional ability as by his works, consisting principally in reports of many hundreds of important and instructive clinical cases. He is rightly considered one of the most illustrious German surgeons. His writings have largely contributed not only to the progress of surgery in general, but also to that of dental surgery in particular.
One of his observations clearly shows the etiological relation frequently existing between a prosopalgia or a supposed hemicrania and a dental affection. The case referred to is that of a lady who had been subject for six months to violent pain in the upper teeth of one side of the jaw. The toothache little by little disappeared, giving place to an obstinate cephalalgia in the same side of the head, which gradually became so intense as to be perfectly insupportable, the patient being particularly subject to it when the weather was cold and damp. After four years of atrocious suffering, and after innumerable remedies had been tried without avail, Fabricius Hildamus—having had the luminous idea of seeking the cause of the evil in the teeth—obtained a complete cure, without further trouble, by extracting four of the patient’s teeth, which were decayed.
Nowadays, it is an all-important canon of medical practice, that in every case of neuralgia occurring within the region influenced by the trifacial nerve one should give particular attention to the state of the teeth and carefully treat every affection of the same. Notwithstanding—we say it with regret—there are still medical men who ignore or neglect this precept, and prescribe internal remedies or have recourse to injections of morphine when they ought, in the first place, to call in the aid of a dentist. How many patients would have been delivered from slow martyrdom if the example of the clear-seeing physician of Berne had been followed from his days up to the present time!
Fabricius Hildanus relates, besides, many cases of dental fistula, cured by him through the extraction of roots or of decayed teeth. In one such case the fistula dated from fourteen years back. Fabricius Hildanus, contrary to the opinion of many other doctors, extracted a decayed tooth, and by this operation obtained, in a brief period of time, the complete recovery of the patient.
Among the many very important clinical cases cited by Fabricius Hildanus, the following deserves to be recorded: In the year 1590 a woman presented herself to him who had a hard tumor in the space behind the last molar on the right side. The author, after having prepared the patient for the operation by the methods then in use (that is, by aperient medicine, by bleeding, and appropriate diet), destroyed the tumor by the application of escharotic substances. The remaining wound, however, defying all the cicatrizing remedies which the author had recourse to, one after the other, by reason of its being continually disturbed by the movements of the jaws, he then thought of maintaining the dental arches in a determined position, and this he obtained by means of two pieces of wood somewhat hollowed out above and below, which he placed on the right and on the left between the upper and the lower teeth, fixing them to the teeth themselves by brass wires passing through two openings made expressly in each of the two pieces of wood. In this way he succeeded in obtaining the absolute immobility of the jaws and the complete cure of the wound in a few days, during which time the patient was nourished with liquid food.[339]