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Modern dentists repair cavities (dental caries) by drilling them out, then filling them in with fillings, bonding, or resin. When teeth are beyond repair they pull them out and replace them with false teeth - a bridge, a plate, or a full set of dentures. The first metal dental fillings were installed by English surgeons way back in 1673. But it wasn't until 1844 that Boston dentist Horace Wells pioneers anaesthesiology. after learning how to administer nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") from Gardner Colton. Wells first used it to deaden pain while extracting his own tooth. A year later he attempted to demonstrate use of the gas for a class at Harvard Medical School. His patient, however, was not completely anesthetized when Wells pulled the tooth and thus failed to impress his audience.

Two years later another Boston dentist William Thomas Green Moton made a similar discovery. Unfamiliar with C. W. Long's 1842 ether discovery, he attended a lecture by chemist Charles T. Jackson and learned that inhaling sulfuric ether can cause a loss of consciousness. He tried the gas on himself and on his dog before using it to extract a tooth from a patient. News of the painless extraction was leaked to the newspapers, where Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow read about it. He then persuaded Morton to demonstrate his procedure at Massachusetts General Hospital when surgeon John Collins Warren used ether on a patient during an operation. Ether found immediate use in operations on Mexican War casualties, opening a new era in surgery as well as dentistry. In 1875 Kalamazoo, Mich., inventor George F. Green patented an electric dental drill. He assigned his patent on electromagnetic dental tools" for sawing, filing, dressing, and polishing teeth to Samuel S. White of Philadelphia whose company became the leading U.S. producer of dental equipment, but use of electric drills had to wait for the development of lighter engines and less expensive batteries. In 1945 a fluoridation program at Grand Rapids, Mich. was the first attempt to fluoridate community water supplies in order to reduce the number of cavities in children. A similar plan in Newburgh, N.Y., follows aroused widespread opposition.

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15y ago

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