Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1875 — Marvels of Chinese Dentistry. [ARTICLE]

Marvels of Chinese Dentistry.

Roaming in quest of novelty through that mine of marvels, a Chinese city, we were a witness the other day of a strange but not uncommon scene. We had halted in front of the stall of a street-apothecary surgeon and general practitioner, and were turning over with our eyes his stock of simples, dragons’-teeth, tigers’-claws and like drugs used as ingredients in the native pharmacopoeia, when along came a man, holding his hand up to his jaw and apparently m great pain. He sat down by the doctor and explained to him that he was suffering with the toothache, to get rid of which he would like to have his tooth removed. Tie doctor opened his patient’s mouth and inspected the aching tooth; then he took a small phial from his stock of medicines, and into the palm of his hand he shook a lew acruples of a pink-colored powder. He next licked his finger and dipped ft into the powder, and inserting this into the man’s mouth rubbed it on the aching tooth and gum. He repeated this three or four times, and then concluded by turning the patient’s head upside down; when, to the no small astonishment of many of the bystanders, among whom was apparently the man himself, the tooth dropped out and fell on the ground. The doctor then asked him if he had felt any pain, to which he replied that he had not, and the payment of a small fee brought the seance to a close. At our appllcationthe tooth was picked up and very civilly exhibited to us by the owner himself, and Was evidently fresh from a human jaw, though there had not been the slightest effusion of blood from the mouth. The thought had naturally suggested itself to us that the whole thing was a hoax and that the patient was an accomplice; but if so the doctor was no novice at sleight-of-hand, and the expression of astonishment on the ether man’s“face when he found his tooth gone was as perfect a specimen of histrionic emotion as has ever been our lot to behold. That night we had visions of a large establishment in Regent street with an enormous placard announcing * Painless Dentistry” oyer the door, and crowds of dukes and duchesses mounting and descending our stairs to have their teeth extracted by some mysterious process imported from China and known to ourselves alone. Next day we proceeded to rummage through our Chinese medical library and see what we could hunt up on the subject of dentistry. The result of this search we generously oiler to bur readers, thus perhaps sacrificing the chance of securing a colossal fortune. In the “New Collection of Tried Prescriptions,” a sort of domestic medicine published for the use of families in cases of emergency when no physician is at hand, we find the following remarks: Method toe ExTRACTiNe Aching Teeth.—A . tooth ought not to be taken out, for by 80 doing the remaining teeth will be loosened. If the pain is very acute and interferes with eating or drinking. then the tooth may be extracted; otherwise 'it should be left. Take a bream about ten ounces in weight, rip it open and insert one-tenth of an ounce of powdered arsenic. Then sew up the body and, hang it up in the wind, where it is not exposed to the sun or accessible to cats and rats. After being thus hung for seven days a kind of hoar-froet will have formed upon the scales of the fish. Preserve this, nsing for each tooth about as much as covers one scale. When required, spread It on a piece of any kind of plaster. press it with the finger on to the aching place and let it stick thero. Then let the patient cough and the tooth will fall out of itself. This prescription has been tested by Dr. Wang. Another Method.—Take a head of garlic and pound it up to a pulp. Mix it thoroughly with one or two candareens’ weight of white dragon’s bones, and apply It to the suffering part. In a little while the tooth will drop out. It will be noticed that the above prescriptions are neither without one or other of two characteristics always to be found in the composition of Chinese remedies. In the first recipe the ingredients are simple enough, and all that is required is time, seven days being necessary for its preparation. Now as it is very unlikely that anyone would collect the “hoar-frost” deposit from the scales of a bream stuffed with arsenic in anticipation of a future toothache, and as he would probably have got well long before the expiration of the seven days il he set to work to make his medjcine only when the tooth began to ache, the genius of the physician and the efficacy of his recipe are alike secure from attack. In the second case, the very existence of one of the drugs mentioned is, to say the least, apocryphal; and although such can be purchased at the shops of native druggists, any complaint on the part of a duped patient would be met by the simple answer that the white dragon’s bones he bought could not possibly have been genuine.— Celestial Empire. ** ■ A Detroit father purchased a toolchest for his son, a lad of eight, who seemed to have considerable mechanical genius. Up to latest accounts the boy f has sawed ofl but two table-legs, six knobs from the bureau, bored seven holes through the doors and three through the piano-case, and by the aid of the glue pot stuck the family supply of napkins firmly to the parlor carpet. “ Oh, ma!” said Miss McStinger, rushing in to her ma— “ ma, what a twelvedozen creature our washerwoman is!” “Indeed, is she? And what’s that, my dear? 1 ? -quoth thfe admiring mamma. “Why, don’t you know that twelve dozen is a gross,” replied the astonished miss, “ and . a gross is very coarse?” “Yes, of course. What a lovely thing education is, my child!”