Ancient Toothbrushes

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. Donald Gossett. I'm an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. I have training in dentistry and specialty training in maxillofacial surgery. Today we're going to speak about some fairly general aspects of general dentistry and possibly specialized dentistry and hopefully be able to educate you a little better on some of those topics. Today we're going to talk about ancient toothbrushes and how people cared for their teeth back in the times where we didn't have the opportunity to go down to Colgate Palmolive and get a toothbrush. It was a bit more difficult for people back them and so they had to improvise with what they're common things that they had around. Since they were hunters, they would kill animals and the bristles of the hair they'd take similar to this, they'd take the bristles out, they would either take a bamboo reed or a stick or something similar to that, they would take the hairs, they would split the device and then when they split it they would put the hairs in between the split, tie it back together and use this to actually clean or brush their teeth. They'd combine that with water and occasionally they'd even take a little pumice from the ground and put on as a dentifrice and that's how people in ancient times cleaned their teeth. This is Dr. Donald Gossett, I hope you enjoyed the information to the point to where you may pursue dentistry or you may pursue the benefits of some of the treatment alternatives."