Pain and Hunger

Tom Shippey

• Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1660-1850 by Roy Porter
  Manchester, 280 pp, £19.95, August 1989, ISBN 0 7190 1903 6
• Popular Errors by Laurent Joubert and Gregory David de Rocher
  University of Alabama Press, 348 pp, $49.95, July 1989, ISBN 0 8173 0408 8
• Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe by Piero Camporesi, translated by David Gentilcore
  Polity, 212 pp, £19.50, May 1989, ISBN 0 7456 0349 1
• Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics and History by Mary Kilbourne Matossian
  Yale, 190 pp, £18.00, November 1989, ISBN 0 300 03949 2

What would you do if you had toothache, in a world of pre-modern dentistry? Those of us who have suffered a weekend of it can probably imagine (in the end) getting a friend to pull the tooth out with pliers. But what if the tooth was absessed? Or impacted? An impacted wisdom tooth growing sideways underneath the other ones? Can one imagine cutting into the gum – no X-rays to tell you where to cut, of course – and levering it out, very probably bit by bit? Anyone who has had this done under modern conditions will not like to think about such treatment under premodern conditions: but then, what was the alternative? Some of the root-rotted teeth found in archaeological excavations make one wonder whether it was possible to die just from pain. The thought casts a new light on the side-remark of Chaucer’s Northern student in the Reeve’s Tale: ‘Oure maunciple, I hope he will be deed, Swa werkes ay the wanges in his heed’ – I expect he’ll die, the teeth in his head hurt so continuously.

Vol. 11 No. 23 · 7 December 1989 » Tom Shippey » Pain and Hunger (print version)
Pages 10-11 | 2921 words