Patients were in excruciating pain and acted like “rabid animals”—until the tooth exploded and people felt immediate pain relief.
In the United States, in the 19th century, many patients went to the dentist’s office with a strange complaint: their teeth had exploded inside their mouths. One such case was a reverend in Pennsylvania who, in 1817, suffered from a toothache so severe that the “left wild“.
“During his agony, he would run hither and thither, in a vain effort to obtain some relief; now stick your head in the ground like an enraged animal, sometimes he would stick it under the corner of the fence, and again he would go to the fountain and dip his head to the bottom in the cold water; which so alarmed his family that they took him to the cottage and did everything in their power to calm him down,” reported dentist WH Atkinson in 1860.
But all these efforts were in vain, until an unusual moment finally relieved the reverend. “At nine o’clock the next morning, he was walking along in a wild delirium, and suddenly, with a sharp crack, like a pistol shot, his tooth exploded into fragments, giving him instant relief. At this point, he turned to the woman and said ‘my pain is gone,’” writes Atkinson.
The dentist further described two similar cases in 1830 and 1855 and there are several documents from other clinicians that report similar situations. The stories of exploding teeth have only just begun to slow down in the 1920s.
So what was up? There are several theories that try to explain the phenomenon. One hypothesis is that theace accumulated in rotten teeth, which caused the explosion. However, this theory does not explain the explosion, as this gas does not cause enough pressure for the dent to burst, writes the IFLScience.
A more likely explanation is that the explosion was caused by the chemicals used at the time for dental fillings. According to the chemist Andrea Sella, in the 19th century, dentists used a wide variety of metals in the treatment of caries, from lead tin. The mixture of metals could turn the tooth into a battery.
“Due to the mixture of metals they have in their mouth, there may be spontaneous electrolysis. My preferred explanation is that if a restoration was done badly so that part of the cavity was still there, that would mean the possibility of hydrogen build up inside a tooth”, says Sella.
ZAP // 
