The author divides maladies of the dental apparatus into three classes, that is:
1. Maladies deriving from external causes and acting, therefore, especially on the crown or uncovered part of the tooth.
2. Maladies of the hidden parts of the tooth, that is, of the neck and root.
3. Symptomatic maladies, deriving from the teeth.
In the first class the author includes 45 pathological states, 17 in the second and 41 in the third, making up a total of 103 morbid conditions. This should be sufficient to give us an idea of the accuracy with which Fauchard studied the maladies of the dental apparatus, especially if one considers that preceding authors had reduced these maladies to a very small number. Fauchard’s classification is very complete, for notwithstanding the progress made in succeeding years in this science, the pathological conditions not to be found comprised in it are exceedingly few. Naturally, the 103 diseases enumerated by Fauchard do not represent as many distinct morbid entities. The author, in classifying dental maladies, keeps especially in view the requirements of the practitioner, and therefore makes numerous distinctions in each morbid process. Thus, he distinguishes a great many varieties of caries, viz., the soft and putrid caries, the dry caries, the caries in part dry and in part soft, the caries complicated by fracture, the superficial caries, the deeper and the deepest, the caries of the different surfaces of the crown, and so on. Also in the classification of other morbid processes, Fauchard makes multifarious distinctions.
The passage referring to worms in the teeth deserves to be here reproduced:[414]
“Sometimes worms are to be found in the carious cavities of the teeth, or in the deposit of tartar that covers them, and to these the name of dental worms has been given. Observations recorded by illustrious authors are extant which attest this. Not having ever seen these worms, I neither admit nor deny their existence. Nevertheless, I conceive the thing nor to be physically impossible, although at the same time I do not believe at all that these worms destroy the teeth or cause them to decay, but rather that the eggs of some insect having been introduced into the carious cavity of the tooth, either through alimentary substances or through the saliva, these eggs thus deposited have developed and produced the worms alluded to. However this may be, as they are not the real cause of the caries, their eventual presence does not require any particular consideration.” Fauchard again recurs to the subject of worms in Chapter VIII, in speaking of the particular causes of caries.[415]
“It was, and is still, believed by the vulgar and also by some writers that all toothache is caused by worms, which little by little destroy the tissue of the osseous fibers and the nervous threads. If this were so, the explanation of pains and of decay in the teeth would be very simple. This opinion is founded on pretended experiences relating to these insects, which may, it is said, be made to fall out of the teeth by the smoke of henbane seeds; this, however, has been declared fabulous by Andry, dean of the medical faculty of Paris, as well as other similar facts which he exposes in his book on the generation of worms.[416]