Modern medicine (including modern dentistry) is nothing short of amazing. While people in the future may look back at certain practices and wonder how and why we did it, there is really no doubt that we are much better off than people living in centuries past.

For anyone who has experienced the agony of a toothache, it is clear that there have been some amazing advancements in the field of dentistry. Thanks to toothbrushes and toothpaste, dental cleanings, x-rays, and other practices, humans can avoid a large number of dental issues.

Of course, we make our teeth much worse by consuming massive amounts of sugar each day, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Even with the best dental care, teeth sometimes go bad or get knocked out due to an accident. When that happens, modern dentistry can create a brand new tooth out of a titanium alloy and implant it into the mouth, providing the patient with a lifelong solution.

These implants work extremely well, but they are only really possible thanks to a long and kind of scary history with dental implants.

There is evidence going back to around 600 CE from ancient Maya sites showing that our ancestors used things like seashells, pieces of jade, and more as a replacement for a tooth.

Most experts would agree that the practice goes back much further than that, with varying degrees of success.

In the 18th century, transplanting teeth from one person to another was starting to catch on. Dr. John Hunter (1728-1793) was particularly interested in this practice and thought that one good way to test this out was to try to implant a human tooth into a chicken. A paper written about this experiment says:

“Dr. Hunter suggested transplanting teeth from one human to another; his experiment involved the implantation of an incompletely developed tooth into the comb of a rooster. He observed an extraordinary and astonishing event: the tooth became firmly embedded in the comb of the rooster and the blood vessels of the rooster grew straight into the pulp of the tooth.”

This doctor, and others of the time, found some success with implanting human donor teeth into other humans. These teeth would often come from cadavers, but it wasn’t uncommon for teeth to be purchased from the poor and implanted into the wealthy who could afford them.

Ethics aside, these implanted teeth would typically not fully bond into the mouth, meaning they wouldn’t last very long. Dr. Paul Craddock explained:

“You might get a few months, or at most a few years, out of a tooth, but you’d invariably need another when that fell out (and if there was no compatibility between donor and recipient it wouldn’t take at all).”

So, if you ever need a tooth implant, be thankful that you live in modern times. No matter how future dentists look back at the practice of using titanium alloys, it will certainly be better than using donor teeth that may or may not have been implanted in a chicken.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this study that found copious amounts of lead in popular toothpastes, including those marketed to kids.