An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything you Thought you Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge by Richard Zacks

Author:Richard Zacks [Zacks, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76640-3
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 2010-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

THE PATRON SAINT OF TOOTHACHES

The Middle Ages, while not known for many breakthroughs, did succeed in producing some of the most disgusting mouths in the history of the human race. Teeth were at an all-time low: rotting, blackened, cracked, painful.

The martyrdom of Saint Apollonia with melodramatic pliers. Miniature by Jean Fouquet (1416–1480).(bm3-47)

Sometimes, itinerant teeth pullers in Europe wandered from town to town with a little medicine show, climaxed by the locals watching their brethren writhe in agony while teeth were yanked by long metal pliers. Barbers—along with surgery and hair cutting—did tooth pulling. Remember, there was no local anesthetic.

It’s no wonder the Church did a thriving business in devotional offerings to Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of tooth pain.

According to legend, Apollonia—the daughter of a pagan magistrate in Alexandria, Egypt—decided to convert to Christianity. The young woman was tortured to renounce Christ and return to the Roman gods, but she refused. The authorities started pulling her teeth out one by one. Still, she refused. She died a martyr’s death at the stake. In 300 A.D., she was canonized.

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