Page 248 - My FlipBook

232 THIRD PERIOD—MODERN TIMES

them. (It is probable that this observer, as well as others, mistook the
dental pulp for a worm, an unpardonable error, in truth, at a time when
the anatomical constitution of the teeth had already been very well
studied by several scientists, and especially by the celebrated Bartolomeo
Eustachius.)
Gabriel Clauder (1633 to 1691) not only believed in dental worms,
but maintained besides that these were the most frequent among all the
causes of toothache. In a certain way, to sustain this opinion of his, he
relates a case in which a tooth of healthy appearance being the seat of
great pain, a tooth-drawer had asserted that there must be a worm in
its interior; and, in fact, on the tooth being extracted and afterward split,
the little animal whose existence the tooth-drawer had divined, was found
to be existing inside of it!
Philip Salmuth asserts that by using rancid oil he got a worm out
of the decayed tooth of a person suffering from violent toothache, thus
causing the cessation of the pain. The worm, he says, was an inch and
a half in length (!) and similar in form to a cheese maggot.
NicoLAUS Pechlin (1646 to 1706), professor of medicine at Kiel,
testifies to having seen five such dental worms, like maggots, come out
by the use of honey, though he does not say whether they issued from
several cavities or from one only!
Gottfried Schulz. But all this is nothing compared to what
Gottfried Schulz has dared to assert, viz., that by using the gastric juice
of the pig, worms of great size can be enticed out of decayed teeth; some
of these even reaching the dimension of an earth-worm!
It is not much to be wondered at that these things should have been
blindly believed in, if we reflect that only a short time previous to this
the story of the golden tooth had been taken seriously by men of great
erudition, and that in the very epoch of which we are speaking the illus-
trious anatomist Thomas Bartholin (1616 to 1680), of Copenhagen,
relates having seen a man, at Padua, who had an iron tooth! Besides,
the possibility of such a phenomenon was explained in a most curious
manner by Thomas Minadous, who explained that in the same way
as iron is generated in the macrocosm, that is, in the world, so it is
equally admissible that it may be generated in the microcosm, that is,
in man !'
Nathaniel Highmore. In the year 1651 the English physician and
anatomist Nathaniel Highmore (1613 to 1684), of Hampton, published
a treatise on anatomy {Corporis Iiuinaiii disquisiiio aiiatoniica, etc.), by
which he acquired a celebrity superior, perhaps, to his merits. This
work, however, served without doubt to diffuse the knowledge of an

' Sprengfl, Geschiclitt- dcr Cliirurgie, vol. ii, pp. 294, 299.