OMG! You guys! I cannot believe my luck. Somehow, while searching for information on the first toothbrush, I found a YouTube video funded in part by the Chinese government showing a collection of…wait for it…ANCIENT CHINESE TOOTHBRUSHES! Pinch me. I must be dreaming. Since I do not speak, or read Chinese I used the wonders of the internet to network out to my group of friends to find someone who could do the translations for me. I wanted the labels shown of each toothbrush translated so I could research their time periods more and determine which toothbrush I would use for the great toothbrush making experiment. Because, yes, I am…

I apologize for being remiss! I never published my first oral hygiene paper from 2017. Or, if I did, I cannot find it since I changed sites. So, here you go! The history of oral hygiene is diverse and extensive.  Contrary to believe in television and movies, people during the Middle Ages and Renaissance took great care of their teeth, as it was a sign of social standing to have well maintained teeth and sweet breath.  Therefore, throughout history there is a plethora of documentation outlining the process of oral hygiene. In this work, I plan on discussing a tooth water from Naturall & Artificial Directions for health by William…

Welcome back! My last blog on oral hygiene discussed the works of Hippocrates, Pliny the Elder and Paulus Aegienta. I posted several passages from their works in which the care of the teeth was discussed. This blog is going to break their components down and see if we can determine if they have any modern evidence to support their use. Why, Hippocrates? The passage written by Hippocrates was broken into several parts, each building on the other. We start with the first. Hippocrates provided a list of ingredients that were to be combined together and rubbed onto the teeth. These ingredients are: the ashes from burning the head of a…

After I exhausted the information I was able to obtain on the history of toilet paper, I elected to move to another facet of hygiene; that of the mouth. Unlike with my research of bathroom sanitation, I was able to find a plethora of information on dental hygiene. It was more information than I could have ever hoped to find. Due to this exhaustive amount of information, I elected to break down the research into a series of blog posts. The purpose of this series is to document what was used by our predecessors. I will look at the similarities and differences in the methods and ingredients used and determine…

All, I would like to make a clarification on a recent blog post. I had incorrectly identified the author and work where the recipe for tooth water was from. I have a collection containing several period works, and believed it part of John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, when, in fact, it is part of William Vaughan’s Naturall & Artificial Directions for health. The collection of works is available through Google Books. The link to the collection is: https://books.google.com/books?id=sTMJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

I tried using the tooth water/paste I made and posted about previously.  I made my husband record a video of me doing it so we could record my initial responses. The video can be found on YouTube at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhU4Uxcqm0E It has been about a half hour since I tried it, and my breath still feels fresh, and my teeth feel very clean. I’m encouraged to keep working on this project, and trying additional dentifrices.

Last night, I experimented with the “tooth water” listed in the Boke of Nurture by John Russell.  It has a very interesting smell and texture. The excerpt from the manual is below: I will aduertise you by foure rules of importance how to keepe your teeth white and vncorruyt (mc), and also to haue a sweete breath. First, wash well your mouth when you haue eaten your meat : secondly, sleepe with your mouth somewhat open. Thirdly, spit out in the morning that which is gathered together that night in the throate : then take a linnen cloth, and rub your teeth well within and without, to take away the fumositie of…

While working on my toothpaste project, I found that clay was used in tooth washes.  It seemed odd to me that clay would have been used, but doing some research I found that the particular clay mentioned, Armenian Bole, is a clay that has been used throughout period for medicinal purposes.  It is mentioned in at least two different tooth cleaning recipes.  Because it had been my intention to recreate these tooth cleaning items and allow people to try them, I needed to research the components carefully to ensure that they were not harmful. The other ingredients were found to be harmless, as they included vinegar, honey, tarragon, alum and…