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230 THIRD PERIOD—MODERN TIMES

within the space of a few hours ; tor which reason it is absolutely neces-
sary, in making use of it, to cover over the neighboring teeth with wax,
so that the healthy ones may not also fall out, as happened, says the
author, in the case of a poor peasant.
The internal use of mercury, and even the use of certain mercurial
preparations used by women as cosmetics, is of damage to the teeth and
imparts to them a blackish or dirty looking color.
Numerous remedies exist for cleaning the teeth, but according to
Riviere the best way of cleaning them consists in rubbing them with
a small stick immersed in sulphuric acid (^spiritus sidphuris aiit vitrioli)
and afterward drying them with a piece of linen. This remedy not
only cleans and renders the teeth white, but it preserves them also from
caries! If the teeth are very dirty, the spirit of vitriol may be used
pure; otherwise one mixes it with niel rosatum or with water.
The great enthusiasm shown by Riviere for the above-mentioned
remedy does not, however, derive from a long experience, made by him-
self or by others, of its advantages, but is based principally on a fact
referred to by Montanus, and which, ^ we will here recount, because, from
it, one clearly perceives how credulously our forebears accepted general
affirmations and formulated therapeutic precepts.
Montanus recounts in one of his writings, how, being in Rome in his
early youth, he became acquainted with a woman of about twenty years
of age, known by the name of Maria Greca (by the way the author
speaks of her, one is led to suspect she was a courtesan); and how, having
seen her again, thirty years later, and found her in pretty much the same
conditions as formerly, he expressed his surprise at this; whereupon
Maria Greca told him that she herself believed that she owed the con-
servation of her beauty to the habit, already of many years' standing,
of using one or two drops of oil of vitriol every morning, as a friction for
the teeth and gums. In her youth she had had very bad teeth, but by
reason of this cure they had become, and were at the time being, beautiful
and perfectly firm; the gums also were in excellent condition; it seemed,
therefore, to her that this conservation of health and freshness, in spite
of her fifty years, depended precisely on the daily use, in the manner
described, of oil of vitriol!^
Riviere, besides, recommends tobacco ashes for cleaning the teeth, a
counsel not yet given by any previous author. He also gives the formulae
for two dentifrice powders, the basis of which is alum; he calls attention

' (Giovanni Battista Montano (1488 to 1551), of Verona, Professor of Medicine at Padua.
^ It is marvellous that an intelligent physician should have lent faith to such a story, related,
too, by such a woman, never reflecting that the daily use of sulphuric acid for the space of
thirty years, that is, about 1 1,000 applications, instead of curing and beautifying bad teeth,
would certainly rather have had tin- cttect of totally destroying the denture of even a mastodon.