>X-Sender: [log in to unmask]
>X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.3 (32)
>Date: Sat, 06 Dec 1997 13:28:36 -0700
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: "Brian W. Kenny" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Dental Museum
>
>LAKE JACKSON, Texas _ The chairs were velvet lined; the dentist's tools
were decorated with ivory-carved handles. A kerosene lamp dangled overhead
on a pulley, and the drill turned as fast as the dentist's foot on the
treadle could make it go.  In the era before electricity and sterile
procedures, dentists' offices had a very different look than patients
expect today.  At Dr. Kim Freeman's endodontics office in Lake Jackson,
visitors and patients can see the differences first-hand by walking through
the Antique Dental Museum, where Freeman's collection of dental antiques is
on display in a specially designed reproduction of a Victorian home.
Dentist's offices of the 19th century were typically located in the
dentist's home.  The little museum is privately owned and too small for
large groups to visit, but Freeman is happy to lead tours of small groups
provided arrangements have been made in advance.  An antiques dealer and
collector before he became a dentist, Freeman, 40, knows a lot about every
detail of the six exhibits. His enthusiasm for history is contagious.  Take
the foot-powered drills, for instance.
>``Foot treadles were still being used into the 1920s because there were a
lot of older dentists who didn't want to fool with that 'gol-darn
electricity','' Freeman says, grinning.
>At best, foot-powered drills made 1,500 revolutions per minute, so they
didn't generate as much heat as modern drills spinning as many as a half
million times per minute, Freeman noted.  As for light, early dentists
``made sure to have a window facing north in their office, because that was
considered the best light for matching shades of teeth,'' he says.
>For centuries, dentistry had a reputation as a painful necessity, in which
dentists were judged by the strength and speed they could bring to bear in
the the course of extracting a tooth.  About 150 years ago, a Boston
dentist named Horace Wells changed that , Freeman says.  ``He was at a
carnival and observed that people inhaling nitrous oxide were laughing and
stumbling around. Then he saw one of them fall on the way to being
seated.''  The fallen man, still under the effect of the gas, had cut his
leg badly but seemed to feel no pain from the injury. ``Wells parlayed that
phenomenon and thought, 'Maybe this will work for dentistry,''' Freeman
explains.  It was an idea that eventually would work, but Wells' first
public demonstration of the anesthetic was a disaster. ``It was in Boston
before a group of oral surgeons and physicians, and it was a complete
failure. The patient woke up and had a pretty bad time. A few years went by
before it was tried again,'' Freeman says.  Dentists of the late 19th
century learned to use chloroform and ether to anesthetize their patients,
and Freeman's museum has some of the masks used for that purpose.  ``There
was a little reservoir in the bottom of the mask for the ether, and you
would heat it up to make the vapors stronger,'' he explains. ``Then the
patient would inhale it and when he was about half out, the dentist would
go to work ask quickly as he could.''  Speed wasn't the only skill a good
dentist needed, though. Artistic skill came in handy, too, for making gold
tooth ``restorations.'' In a back corner of Freeman's office _ away from
the museum _ is an ornate wooden cabinet dating back to 1912. Because
dentists had to keep gold on hand, the cabinet had a special feature _ a
hidden, built-in safe.  ``It was a $20 feature,'' Freeman says.  Wooden
cabinets are not used today in dental offices because the wood can't be
sterilized. In fact, until the 1880s of the instruments weren't sterilized
either, although Freeman says they probably got a ``wipe down'' between
patients.  In the rooms where he treats his own patients, modern  equipment
is the rule. The carved wood, ivory trim and velvet of the past have given
way to clean, sterile lines of moden equipment. But that equipment, despite
its plain design, is
>anything but cheap.  ``Equipment today is Formica over particle board,
with no carving or scrollwork _ and expensive,'' Freeman says.
>
>AP-WS-12-03-97 0112EST
>
>
>

Anita Cohen-Williams
Listowner of HISTARCH, SUB-ARCH, and SPANBORD
Co-listowner/manager of ANTHRO-L
Contributing Editor, Anthropology, Suite101 <http://www.suite101.com>
[log in to unmask]