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…