Memory Monday: Dental Care

My great-grandmother

ALL FOR THE CARE OF THE TEETH

I love to watch the tv show “Survivor.” One of the interesting things I have noticed is the way they take care of their teeth while they are on the island. You can often see one of them scraping his or her teeth with a small stick. I guess that is the best way to keep your teeth clean when you don’t have a tooth brush and toothpaste.

Personally, I like my electric tooth brush and Arm and Hammer or Crest toothpaste. All this led me to research how our ancestors cleaned their teeth. Now, I knew that there hasn’t been toothpaste for all that many years (understand, I’m in my sixties, so I’m talking about “all that many years” before my parents were born), but I found a couple of recipes for making tooth powder that my great-grandfather might have used as he fought in the Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, my great-grandmother might have use some of this powder also, since she wasn’t born until 1862. The following is from a book that came out in 1858 and is titled INQUIRE WITHIN FOR ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW OR OVER THREE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED FACTS WORTH KNOWING. (Don’t you just love titles like this—ones that explain the “real” title?)

Here are the recipes:

AMERICAN TOOTH POW DER. — Coral, cuttle fish-bone, dra gon's blood, of each eight drachms; burnt alum and red sanders, of each four drachms; orris root, eight drachms: cloves and cinnamon, of each half a drachm ; vanilla, eleven grains ; rosewood, half a drachm; rose pink, eight drachms. All to be finely pow dered and mixed.

QUININE TOOTH POWDER.—Rose pink, two drachms; pre cipitated chalk, twelve drachms; car bonate of manesia, one drachm ; qui nine (sulphate), six grains. All to be well mixed together.

I don’t know what most of the things in the recipes above are and I don’t think I want to know. Just the thought of everyone in the family sticking their damp toothbrush in to the same jar of tooth powder does funny things to my stomach, especially when I know that some of them chewed tobacco. Let’s just say that I’m happy to have the tubes of white paste that I can squeeze out of a tube—stuff that tastes like mint. Yep, I’m really happy to use what we have today, and everyone in our house has their own tube.