Historic Dental Facts

If you love trivial facts, I found some fun stuff on the web to share. The following is a compilation of dental facts that I found in numerous places....there is so much information available out there and only so much space for it in a blog! I will probably post again on this topic in the near future.  Enjoy!!

• George Washington NEVER actually had wooden teeth! He did, however, wear dentures.  They were made from a mixture of gold, tusks of a hippo, elephant ivory and human teeth!  Ugh!
• In early America, it was common for dentistry to be a secondary profession.  You might have visited your barber, who was also a dentist.  Or your blacksmith.....
• Twigs from trees served as toothpicks and tooth brushes.  Known then as a "chewstick" you could make a toothbrush out of a twig by chewing the end of the twig so that the fibers would spread out.  Great knowledge to have now for survival skills!
• The first licensed female dentist was Lucy Beaman Hobbs in 1866. She was denied entrance into college because of her gender, and went on to establish her degree with the help of a private tutor.
• Did you know that Paul Revere was a dentist?  He was an accomplished Silversmith by trade, but practiced amatuer dentistry as well.  He used his skill as a Silversmith to craft dentures out of ivory and metal. He is responsible (however unwittingly) for what we know today as  forensic dentistry (the identification of corpses through dental records) He identified a friend who died at Bunker Hill when he recognized his own work in the remains of the teeth.
• The very first dental drill was a foot driven utensil invented in 1790 by a man named John Greenwood.  He fashioned the drill using his mother's foot treadle spinning wheel as an example, and it worked! 

This is great stuff!  Here is one more fact I found on the web that you might think is amazing....I'd love to do this survey again now, in 2013. The fact states that a in survey done in 2003 of adults and teens,  the toothbrush was the # 1 invention that people couldn't live without, even winning out over computers and cell phones!  I'd be willing to bet that if that survey was done today, cell phones would win hands down.  What do you think?