Reflections | Dental care in ancient China was quite advanced, although not up to modern standards
- More than 2,000 years ago, Chinese physicians were treating patients’ teeth, sometimes successfully
- Mentions of dentures, or ‘planted teeth’, appear in certain 12th-century writings
The biography of the famous doctor Chunyu Yi (205–150BC), in Records of the Grand Historian, recorded 25 of his cases, one of which involved dental work. A grandee in the state of Qi was suffering from tooth decay. Chunyu Yi turned to acupuncture, inserting needles into the patient’s left arm, and told him to gargle every day with three sheng (about 650ml) of an infusion of bitter root, the exact composition of which has been lost. The patient became well after five or six days.
According to Chunyu Yi, the cause of the tooth decay was an attack of “wind” because he slept with his mouth open. Also, and this is more in line with modern knowledge of dental hygiene, because he did not gargle after his meals.
The great doctor of the Eastern Han dynasty, Zhang Zhongjing (150–219), recommended using the mineral realgar and common whitlow grass to treat tooth decay. His instructions seemed to involve igniting a mixture of the powdered ingredients and applying the heated medicine on the affected area. Realgar, known as xionghuang in Chinese, is a toxic mineral compound of sulphur and arsenic and is rarely used in traditional Chinese medicine today.
To remedy “imperfect and fallen teeth”, Newly Revised Pharmacopoeia, a book on herbs and clinical medicine compiled in the mid-7th century during the Tang dynasty, recommended combining tin, silver foil and mercury to create an alloy that was “as dense and hard like silver”. It is uncertain whether this was used as a tooth filling or moulded into dentures.