Did people have bad teeth in medieval times?

it's often said the medieval people had bad breath and really bad teeth is that right no it's completely wrong [Music] interestingly in medieval times a lot of people thought diseases were spread by bad smells and miasma so if you had bad breath you were obviously breathing out noxious fumes and that could be really bad for people's health a lot of people thought that you might get ill from other people's bad breath there is some suggestion that people thought that leprosy was caught by bad breath so you'll see in illustrations a lot of lepers cover their faces and that might be to disguise the disfigurement of that terrible disease or it might also be to try and stop the noxious fumes from lepers mouths getting everywhere else many of people were very very aware of dental hygiene some in fact looking after your teeth and cleaning them was a very important part of the medieval ritual we do have evidence of medieval toothbrushes from some remains in London but they look like they're fairly high status and they look like the traditional toothbrush that we would know in the West was known it was carved of wood it had little holes in it for brushes and you could brush your teeth with it so if you didn't have a toothbrush how did you clean your teeth and what do you use if you're a medieval person there's not particularly high status he use a twig now that doesn't really make much sense until you actually try it this is a piece of fresh hazel twig and remember in medieval times hazel was pretty abundant hazel coppices were actually grown on a commercial scale and we use for making fences they were used for the inside bits for wattle and door walls so hazel was a fairly common thing the very very small twigs of it though the sort of one year growth bits of twigs would obviously be a fairly waste product they're they're too green to burn very effectively but they make quite interesting things for cleaning your teeth so this is just a twig doesn't really resemble a toothbrush very much but what you do is this you use those very teeth and you kind of get the end all chewed up and soft and a bit a bit like a brush and then you use that just to clean your teeth just sort of chew the end a little bit and then you kind of clean your teeth with this slightly fuzzy end of the hazel get into the corners now does leave little bits of wood and little bits of bark in your mouth would you just spit out or swill out anyway it doesn't really taste it very much it sort of tastes of kind of green wood I suppose but it's very mild and you certainly not an unpleasant experience or taste if you want to go a little bit further on what you do is you use something else to add to the abrasive nature of your tooth cleaning I have some salt in here which I'm just going to grind up really just to make it a little bit finer and I just kind of lick the end the brush get the salt on it burned down it's not unpleasant actually it's seven salty with a little bit of the flavor of hazel twigs in it now if I want to be really fancy I have a clove here cloves are beautifully smelling spices so they're quite expensive in the medieval period but they were quite widely used and a single clove isn't that expensive so if you were reasonable means you could probably afford a few of these interestingly cloves produce oil of cloves which is still used today in dulling toothache and pain from injured or rotting teeth so oil of cloves is still used and you could just literally just chew a clove to freshen your breath and we know that's the case because Chaucer talks about it in some of his works anyway here's the clove what I'm going to do is grind the clove up into the salt as well and we get clove and salt tooth powder so in it goes and we will grind it up [Music] mixing it with the salt let's see how salty cloves work on your teeth hopefully the clove is going to work quite nicely to sweeten my breath and therefore prove to everybody that I'm not passing on diseases through my halitosis gonna be interesting this [Music] well it's completely what you'd expect it's salty and clovy it's actually really quite pleasant it has no sweetness like a lot of modern toothpastes and let's face it they're largely flavored chalk so this actually feels much healthier strangely enough in the mouth the the cloves cut through the salt quite nicely and um it doesn't leave you feeling like your mouth has got sort of sweetness in it that's why I quite like that I might actually think about using cloves a bit more in my day to day modern life obviously it takes effort rather than just squeezing a tube of toothpaste onto a toothbrush and doing it you have to prepare stuff beforehand which is one of the things with a medieval period you need time to do a lot of these things and the modern world is often about convenience and you lacking time to do certain of the small things that matter so the idea that medieval people all had bad teeth and terrible breath and all that kind of stuff is complete nonsense they actually had from the records we have of burials better teeth than we have today largely they had fewer cavities mind you most of their teeth if they had a cavity would have been torn out by somebody called a tooth puller yes there was a medieval career called tooth puller so didn't really have dentists in quite the same way the only thing they could do was pull the tooth out or leave it [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 818,561

Rating: 4.9420209 out of 5

Keywords: modern history, documentary, history, historical, history documentary, kingsley, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, kingsely, jason kingsely, mediaeval, medeval, knihgt, teeth, tooth, decay, dentist, hygeine, cloves, salt, grooming, health

Id: fcVwcvWePhU

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/T4silly]

Yo, are we about to start repping entertaining historical channels...?

Because I am ALL for that shit!

[u/Yeflacon]

There are also a couple of other things like thinking people were shorter by allot then people are now. Which is also incorrect maybe only a inch or 2 on average and in certain cases they grew only to Pat size due to diet and food available and Royalty like most people you have in FE 3Houses they would have plenty of healthy food Available. But that is the average there were of course allot of people that went way beyond that. https://youtu.be/mCM1cOKM_2Y

And another big one is that people hardly grew older that 30 or 40 years in average. That is because maybe die at child birth or when they were small babies or kids. So that if cours would average out the many people who grew to 50 or older.

[u/time_axis]

I always hate when people use historical arguments to complain about fantasy settings anyway. There is no "historically accurate". Historically, the events of Fire Emblem did not happen. It's not even Earth.

[u/Muezza]

Ancient peoples had sonic showers gifted to them by the ancient astronauts I saw a documentary about it on Discovery.

[u/The_Engineer]

There are a good number of seemingly legit history YouTube channels that are bunk. There are people today who smell bad and have yellow teeth that live in near medieval conditions (remote villagers), and no, they dont "die". I used to watch Shadiversity, then he started talking dumb shit. Seemed totally legit until he started going on about how peasants would eat better and were healthier than the nobility because they ate whole grain wheat.

Try not showering for a month and have no access to a toothbrush, and just eat simple grains or whater peasants ate; let me know if you are smelly and your teeth are just as white.

[u/willfordbrimly]

Because if they did they would probably die

Yeah but...didn't they? Frequently before the age of 40? From diseases their level of science had little to no comprehension of?