A Brief History on Dentistry

Dentistry is the part of medicine that pertains to developing, preventing and treating disease within the mouth. The need for dental care has been around for a long time. For as long as human beings have had cavities there has been a need for dentistry.
 
Toothbrushes started with the ancient Chinese. They began using the necks of pigs cured in cold temperature to invent toothbrushes utilizing the thick boar hair as bristles. Some of the first persons to promote toothbrushes were French dentists in the early eighteenth and seventeenth centuries.

At around 500 B.C., the Chinese and eastern Indians began experimenting with the first toothpastes. Although modern day toothpaste that we are commonly accustomed to wasn't introduced until the 1800's. There is evidence of false teeth going back as far as 700 BC, these false teeth were typically made from ivory and bone by the Etruscans. Evidence states that around 2700 B.C. ancient Chinese experimented with the practice of acupuncture to treat tooth pain.

1815 marks a time in which dentist Levi Parmly was the first to publicly encourage the flossing of teeth. Back then flossing was usually done with pieces of silk thread. Levi Parmly is credited as being the original inventor of dental floss. On another note, a dentist known simple as 'Peabody' was the first to add soap as an ingredient for toothpaste around 1824.

Over the many years of dentistry, many types of materials have been used to fill cavities. Some of these include stone chips, naturally occuring gums and even certain types of metals. 1848 was the year a man know as Arculanus suggested using gold-leaf fillings instead of these traditionally used fillers . Around the 1850's a man named John Harris became the first to add chalk to toothpaste ( we all hate you John Harris). Chalk is now known to be abrasive and to cause more harm to enamel than good.
 
In 1857, Dr. Hiram N. Wadsworth was the first American to put a patent on the toothbrush. After 1885, multiple American corporations started to produce toothbrushes in mass quantities. In January of 1875 the first electric dental drill was patented by a man know as George Green. 

In 1882 unwaxed silk floss was produced for home usage by the Codman and Shurtleft company. Carl Koller was the first to use Cocaine as an anesthetic for dentistry sometime around 1884. In 1892 the collapsible toothpaste tube that we now commonly see on supermarket shelves was created by a Dr. Washington Sheffield.

The Johnson and Johnson company, patented their first line of dental floss in 1898. Novocain replaced the previously used Cocaine in 1905 after a multitude of researchers concluded that it may prove more suitable to formulate a non-addictive numbing solution. This compound isolation is credited to Alfred Einkorn, a German Chemist.

Most Americans didn't internalize the routine of brushing teeth until army soldiers from World War II arrived home with the strict habit of brushing. These learned hygienes were then passed to family members who would then take this habit and pass it on to other family members.

In was in the year of 1938 when the very first nylon bristle toothbrush was commercially launched by Dupont. This was however after the Prophylactic brush was created by the Florence Manufacturing company of Massachusetts. For this reason, Dupont is debatably the first to sell toothbrushes in a box. In 1939 the first electric toothbrush was manufactured and developed in Switzerland. A variation of this device known as the 'Broxodent', was the first American electric toothbrush marketed around the 1960's by a company known as Squibb.