Transplantation is one of the amazing masterpieces of medical science. From kidneys to hands to eyeballs, body parts can be transplanted from donor to recipient in need, but have you ever wondered why you haven’t heard of teeth being transplanted from human donors to people in need? The history of this method, which is called non-autologous tooth transplantation, It is very terrible.
When did dental implants appear for the first time?
Dr. Paul Craddock, historian specializing in the history of dental implant surgery and author of Spare Parts: The Unexpected History of Dental Implant Surgery, says: “It’s hard to say when the first tooth implant was performed. But grafting is one of the oldest forms of surgery and comes to us from scientific horticulture. Joining living things together so that they grow together as a body has been a part of surgery for as long as anyone can remember. This procedure has existed at least since the 6th century in the form of skin grafting, but it was definitely done much earlier.”
Dental reimplantation, in which a tooth that has fallen out, is returned to its original position, was described by Abulqasem al-Zahrawi, an Andalusian physician, around the 11th century AD. Ambrose Pare, a 16th-century French surgeon, also wrote of a story of an aristocratic woman who received a tooth taken from a servant. Craddock explained: “There don’t seem to be many recorded dental implants before the 18th century, and to my knowledge that’s the only period in which dental implants were common.”
How was tooth transplantation done in the past?
In his book, Craddock recounts the method proposed by Charles Allen, which involved an animal donor such as a baboon instead of a human donor: both were restrained, the donor tooth was extracted along with some of the attached gum, the recipient tooth was removed, and the donor tooth was It was stuck inside the recipient’s mouth, hoping that it would eventually boil over.
Tooth reimplantation was described by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi around the 11th century AD
John Hunter, a famous Scottish surgeon and a proponent of dental implants, conducted an experiment to prove the stability of the method in which he removed a person’s tooth, opened the crown of the rooster, pushed the tooth into it, and tied it tightly with thread. A few months later, the rooster was killed, and by examining the tooth inside its crown, Hunter, in his opinion, proved the stability of the tooth graft by observing that the outer surface of the tooth was attached to the crown by blood vessels. Although that probably wasn’t the case, Hunter noted, “This test doesn’t usually succeed, and I’ve succeeded once out of several attempts.”
Hunter did not lose hope and continued to perform autologous tooth transplants in humans, explaining how silk and seaweed could be used to secure the donor tooth and push it into the socket until the two were connected. become
While today, if you act quickly and carefully, you can replant your knocked-out tooth, dental implants in Hunter’s day were often rejected and didn’t last long.
Where were donated teeth obtained in the past?
“I don’t think the dental implant business would exist without a class of rich and poor, without the feeling that one group of people is inferior to another,” Craddock explained. This practice depended on rich people who were concerned about their appearance and poor people who desperately needed money.
Teeth were pulled out of the mouths of people in need of money (often children) and placed in the mouths of rich people who paid for them.
Craddock quotes from Allen’s 1685 Dental Surgery, the first known English-language work on dentistry: “I despise the practice of taking teeth out of other people’s heads and putting them into other mouths, both because of its inhumanity and because of the many problems involved. I do not like. None of these can be called tooth restoration, because the restoration of one is equal to the destruction of the other. It’s just stealing from one to give money to another.”
The trade of dental implants would not be possible without the presence of the rich and the poor
Teeth were also recovered from corpses, including those who died in conflicts such as the Battle of Waterloo, giving rise to the term “Waterloo teeth”.
Craddock points out that Langenbeck’s 1865 manual of surgery considered dental grafting to be peculiarly English and called it the English exploitation of living teeth. When German surgeons began their own dental transplants, they moralized their work by using the teeth of young, healthy people who had died of violence.
How did dental implants become popular?
“I have to say that until the 20th century the words progress and integration should not be put together,” Craddock said. They were simple and brutal for centuries, and tooth grafting became popular because it was promoted by dentists (a new type of scientist in the 18th century) as a cosmetic treatment. But there were no regulations for this work, and in this situation, safety was secondary to profitability.”
Craddock added: “This procedure was associated with many disadvantages: medically, there was transmission of diseases, mainly syphilis. One story tells of a woman from Southampton who received a tooth that was deemed very safe by some eminent surgeons, but soon contracted a venereal disease that destroyed one side of her face and soon led to her death. .
“The most obvious complication, of course, was that they weren’t really efficient,” Craddock explained. Artificial teeth made of porcelain replaced dental implants at the beginning of the 19th century.
Is tooth transplantation done in modern times?
There are case reports documenting the transplantation of non-autologous human teeth. A retrospective study in 1987 showed 73 non-autologous dental implants performed between 1956 and 1980. According to the article, the average performance of these links was 6.8 years; However, one case was still there after 28.5 years.
An article from 1977 contained a report of a young girl who was born with no teeth and had her brother’s teeth transplanted into her mouth (ironically, her brother had to have some of his teeth removed before orthodontic treatment.) The procedure was performed in May 1973. And the transplanted tooth was not successful and was removed in November, but a second attempt was successful in December 1974. However, the article notes: “In general, the current dental literature reflects a distinctly pessimistic view of non-autologous tooth transplantation.”
Tooth transplantation was a brutal operation in the past
However, the human tooth graft is not lost forever and in the right conditions, the patient may be the donor himself.
Implantation of one’s own teeth is a procedure that was first reported in the 1950s. During this procedure, a tooth (such as a wisdom tooth) is extracted and replanted in another place in the same person’s mouth. As mentioned in one of the reviews of scientific works published in 2018 about self-transplantation of teeth: “Although dental implants are the first choice for treatment today, they are not always suitable for pediatric patients.” However, the studies that this review examined indicated a success rate of about 81% of this procedure. The authors noted that larger, better-designed studies are needed.
In 2018, researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry introduced autologous tooth transplantation for children.
Ideally, a native tooth is better suited to accommodate a child’s growing mouth than an implant and encourage bone growth, as there are currently not many good methods of inducing bone growth in medicine.
Medical science has come a long way since dental implants, but we should consider the history of this procedure as a cautionary tale. As Craddock explains, “Tooth grafting was a barbaric operation from an unscientific past. The people doing this were dressed as scientists, but I think it was some kind of marketing ploy.”
But as a surgical procedure, dental implants have deep cultural roots that go back centuries, and were no more technologically advanced at the time than in previous eras.”
