Human evolution gave us teeth more or less designed to suit our feeding habits in ancient times when there was neither soda to drink nor candy to eat. Unfortunately, dentists were not around when nature decided her work on our teeth was finished and we were not given the shark like ability to continuously grow new teeth.
Where Nature Gave Up – Human Ingenuity Succeeded
I guess the early toothless thinkers figured that; if you can hold cutting and grinding blades in your hand, why can’t you hold something similar in your mouth? By 500 BC, the Etruscans were doing just that with dentures made out of old human or other animal teeth. Of course, these were not permanent fixtures. Our own George Washington wore dentures (made from hippo and elephant ivory with included gold, rivets, spiral springs plus some real human teeth).
There are apocryphal tales in folklore and fiction of missing teeth being replaced with all sorts of pegs in materials ranging from wood to gold which were somehow fixed into peoples’ gums to replace lost teeth. It is possible that the Mayan civilization were the first to actually implant a tooth like object into the human jaw bone. A fragment of human mandible dating from about 600 AD was found in Honduras with three tooth-shaped pieces of shell, which are placed into the sockets of the missing lower incisor teeth. Whoever did this may have been the predecessor of the specialists who install dental Implants in Middleton, MA.
A Permanent Fixture
Researchers in the 1950’s were investigating ways of bonding materials to human bone so that artificial replacements for natural parts could be implanted into human bodies. They discovered that implants made of titanium became almost impossible to remove because the bone literally bonded itself to the titanium.
The American dentist Leonard Linkow and an Italian medical doctor -Stefano Melchiade Tramonte – were independently working on applying this principle to dental prostheses and Dr Linkow fitted his first dental implant in 1952. He is justifiably considered to be the father of all who provide dental Implants In Middleton, MA.
Not to say that these developments resulted in an ugly titanium tooth in the recipient’s mouth. The titanium is fixed into the jaw bone and provides a root onto which a visible artificial tooth that is an exact match for its natural neighbors can be affixed. Visit Pandolfoperio.com for more details.
