Living beforetoothbrushes

The problem, as a fable

In a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) painted at the Mughal court about 1560, mice eat the food trapped in an old lion’s teeth, and disturb him doing it. The painter made the lion a tiger; the museum’s record notes that the two were often interchangeable in Indian art.

“Before toothbrushes” needs one caution. The nylon-bristle toothbrush went on sale in 1938, but a brush with bristles is centuries older, as Hangzhou shows below.

India: the twig

The Sushruta Samhita is a medical encyclopedia composed in Sanskrit about two thousand years ago, by the Suśruta Project’s account. Its instructions for the morning, in our paraphrase of K. L. Bhishagratna’s English of 1911: rise early and clean the teeth with a twig cut fresh: straight, sound, with one knot at most, twelve finger-breadths long and as thick as the little finger. The tree is chosen by season and temperament; of the bitter trees, nimba (neem) is the best. Bite the tip into a soft brush, put on a paste of honey, spices, rock salt and oil, and clean each tooth on its own, taking care not to hurt the gum. Then scrape the tongue with a thin strip of gold, silver or wood, and gargle with oil.

Not everyone was to do it. The same chapter forbids the twig to anyone with a complaint of the mouth or throat, a cough, asthma, hiccough, vomiting, indigestion, epilepsy, facial paralysis or ear-ache, and to heavy drinkers or anyone worn out from drinking.

The monk Yijing described the practice in A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (A.D. 671-695): “Every morning one must chew tooth-woods, and clean the teeth with them, and rub off the dirt of the tongue as carefully as possible.” The stick is about twelve finger-breadths long: “Chew softly one of its ends, and clean the teeth with it”. For the elders there is “the stick hammered at one end and made soft”. Yijing claimed that “Tooth-ache is very rare in India owing to their chewing the tooth-wood”, and added: “Even infants of three years old are taught how to do it.” (tr. J. Takakusu, 1896, pp. 33 to 35.)

A used stick was not simply dropped. It is thrown away “after having made three fillips with the fingers, or after having coughed more than twice”. Takakusu’s footnote gives the rule behind it: nothing was to be thrown away “without making some noise beforehand for a warning”.

The Anguttara Nikaya counts “five benefits of using chew sticks”: “It’s good for your eyes, you don’t get bad breath, your taste-buds are cleaned, bile and phlegm don’t cover your food, and food agrees with you.” (5.208, tr. Bhikkhu Sujato, SuttaCentral, CC0.)

Arabia: the siwak

In al-Bukhari’s collection, Abu Hurayra reports a saying of the Prophet Muhammad:

“Or: on the people” is the narrator’s own doubt about the wording, not ours.

A second report, from Aisha, stands in al-Bukhari’s chapter on the Prophet’s illness and death:

“Broke it” is the sure part of the verb. A shorter report, no. 890, reads فَقَصَمْتُهُ ثُمَّ مَضَغْتُهُ, broke it, then chewed it.

The siwak is still a chewing stick cut from the stem, twig or root of the arak tree (Salvadora persica), about a centimetre thick and 15 centimetres long. Soaked, its end is crushed until it looks like a brush. One study in Cameroon, cited by a 2021 review, found 85 percent of adults using one (Ramli, Mohd-Dom and Mohd-Said 2021).

Rome: powders, and a courtroom

About 155 to 161 CE Apuleius stood trial at Sabratha, in Libya, before Claudius Maximus. The prosecution read out his own verses: “They began by reading one of my jeux d’esprit”, a letter in verse about a tooth powder, sent to one Calpurnianus. Four of its lines, in H. E. Butler’s English of 1909: “This delicate dust of Arab spices fine / With ivory sheen shall make thy mouth to shine, / Shall smooth the swollen gums and sweep away / The relics of the feast of yesterday.”

The accuser, Apuleius says, “condemned my administration of a tooth-powder with fiercer indignation than has ever been shown in condemning the administration of a poison” (Apologia 7). His answer takes two words: “‘Dentes splendidas’: ignosce munditiis”, in Butler’s English “‘You clean your teeth.’ Excusable cleanliness.” (Apologia 103.)

In the 40s CE, under Claudius, Scribonius Largus wrote down the powders themselves, and who used them:

Our English

“For toothache and for strengthening the teeth, the bark of the edulis root does good, dried in the sun, pounded and sifted; so does white glass, the kind that looks like crystal, carefully ground, with spikenard mixed in. Many people also use a tooth powder of this kind. They gather the herb urceolaris (pellitory) when it is already in seed, as much as they can, with the root; wash it and dry it for a day; the next day steep it in fresh strong brine; on the third day squeeze it out and pack it into a new pot, laying rock salt between like floors, and bake it through in the furnace of the baths until it turns to charcoal. Afterwards they grind it and mix in enough spikenard, a third part. Besides making the teeth white, this also strengthens them. The Augusta is known to have used it. Messalina, wife of our god Caesar, uses this one: a sextarius of deer horn burnt to ash in a new pot, an ounce by weight of Chian mastic, and an ounce and a half by weight of sal ammoniac.”

Scribonius Largus, Compositiones 60, ed. Helmreich 1887, p. 27. Our translation.

Latin

Ad dentium dolorem et confirmationem bene facit radicis edulis cortex sole arefacta et contusa, cribrata; item vitrum candidum, quod simile crystallo est, diligenter tritum admixta spica. Utuntur plerique etiam huiusmodi dentifricio: Herbam urceolarem legunt, cum iam in semine est, quam plurimam cum radice, deinde lotam uno die siccant, postridie recenti muria dura macerant, tertio die expressam olla nova conponunt, subinde salis fossicii quasi tabulata interponunt atque ita percoquunt fornace balneariorum, donec in carbonem redigantur. Postea tritae ad tertias admiscent spicae nardi quod satis est. Hoc cum eo quod candidos facit dentes, tum etiam confirmat. Augustam constat usam. Nam Messalina dei nostri Caesaris hoc utitur: Cornorum cervi ustorum in olla nova ad cinerem redactorum sextario uno, mastiches Chiae pondo uncia, salis ammoniaci pondo sescuncia.

“The Augusta” stays unnamed because Scribonius doesn’t say which. The ground glass is a toothache remedy, not a whitener. Edulis stays in Latin, since it may be a plant’s name. Messalina is alive in the chapter, one of the two clues its editor uses to date the book: after Claudius’s campaign in Britain and shortly before her death.

Martial gives a tooth powder a voice: “Let the fair and young use me. I am not accustomed to polish false teeth.” (Epigrams 14.56, Bohn’s Classical Library, 1897.) And of two women: “Thais has her own, Laecania bought ones.” (5.43.) Pliny the Elder held that picking the teeth with a vulture’s feather sours the breath, and that a porcupine’s quill strengthens the teeth (Natural History 30.9).

Hangzhou, about 1274: toothbrush shops

Wu Zimu’s Mengliang lu is a guide to Hangzhou; its preface is dated mid-autumn 1274. The chapter on shops runs through the famous ones:

The list runs name, goods, shop: a silk shop, a paper-goods shop, a candle shop. On that pattern 刷牙鋪 is a toothbrush shop. The reading is ours. Both blind translators chose it unprompted, and both named the doubt: a shop for tooth-care goods in general, or a tooth-cleaning business. Two texts support the brush. The same chapter has toothbrushes carried through the lanes and streets for sale, with the combs:

And in 1291 toothbrushes are things made of horse-tail hair (below). The three words left in Chinese split our two blind translators.

The Chunyou years are 1241 to 1252. The preface says 1274, but the Siku editors doubted that date, since the preface looks back on it all as a dream, as if the Song had already fallen, and in 1274 it had not. “By the 1270s” is safe either way: the shops were famous from the Chunyou years.

“Master” stands for guanren, a word for an office-holder. A Qing word-book that quotes the Mengliang lu’s shop names, Master Fu’s among them, explains it:

The twig was in China before the brush. Yijing, in the 7th century: “Some in China use small sticks of willow which they chew completely in their mouth without knowing how to rinse the mouth and remove the juice.” (tr. Takakusu, p. 35.)

China, 1291 to 1488: horse-tail hair, and dawn or night

Li Pengfei’s health manual, its preface dated 1291, quotes a book it does not name:

Li Shizhen’s Bencao gangmu (Ming) cites the warning in its entry on the horse, in a short form, 刷牙用馬尾，令齒疏損: brushing the teeth with horse tail makes them gappy and damaged.

Hu Sihui’s dietary manual, presented to the emperor in 1330, takes a side on the hour:

In 1488 the Korean official Ch’oe Pu travelled through China and kept a diary:

The river is the Yangzi. The second sentence is ambiguous: “the same” may be the taste for adornment, not the things carried.

A Korean textbook of spoken Chinese, the Pak tongsa, first written in late Yuan or early Ming by one account, teaches the shopping:

The speakers are unmarked in the text. We have no scholar’s date for this scene, so it carries no year here.

Japan: a stick at dawn

The evidence here is pictures. In Kitao Shigemasa’s woodcut of 1778 a woman on a veranda holds a short stick to her mouth while a servant brings water; morning glories grow at the railing. The Art Institute of Chicago titles Torii Kiyonaga’s print of about 1779 Woman Admiring Morning Glories while Brushing Her Teeth (“Brushing” is the museum’s word) and Isoda Koryūsai’s of about 1775 Courtesan Admiring Morning Glories while Cleaning Her Teeth. In Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s print of 1888, a girl of the 1840s waking up, the slender stick ends in a frayed tuft, and the morning glories are there again. That the flowers were a set companion of the morning’s tooth-cleaning is our estimate from these four prints, not a museum’s claim.

Tooth powder is said to have gone on sale in Japan in 1643, to whiten the teeth and clear bad smells (Murai 2001, citing an older source). A health manual of 1713, the Yōjōkun, advised rinsing the mouth a few times with hot tea after meals and with warm salted tea at night. At New Year, eating hard things such as dried rice cake was meant to harden the teeth, and with them to lengthen life (the Rijksmuseum’s note on a print by Totoya Hokkei, about 1822).

England, 1691 to 1787: a tooth brush on the bill

Anthony Wood, the Oxford antiquary, kept notes of what he owed. In his almanac for 1690: “Stockings, of the taylor : toothbrush, (of) J. Barret.” And on the page his editor heads January, 1691: “Owing to Mr. Barret Jan. 30, 1690 [...] F., [...] tooth brush, half an ounce of tobacco, thread.” The date is 30 January 1691. John Barret supplied Wood with shirts and other goods, and Wood had known him for forty years or more when he died; the notes don’t say where the brush came from.

By 1778 brushing was ordinary. John Hunter, in A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Teeth, writes that tartar can beat “the common methods of prevention, such as washing and brushing the Teeth”; some people “rub them with a piece of cloth on the fore finger”, others use “the dust of a burnt cork, burnt bread”.

The same book has a chapter on transplanting teeth, “one of the nicest of all operations” (nicest, in 1778, meaning the most exacting). The donor’s “should be a full grown young Tooth”, preferably “that of a female, for female Teeth are in general smaller”. Hunter also set a human tooth in a cut in a cock’s comb, and months later found its vessels joined to the comb’s: “I succeeded but once out of a great number of trials.”

Thomas Rowlandson drew the trade in 1787. In the Wellcome Collection’s description of a later copy of the print, a dental surgeon and his assistant pull teeth from poor children and fit them straight into the mouths of rich, elderly clients.

1938: the nylon bristle

On 24 February 1938, by the Hagley Library’s account, DuPont began making nylon toothbrush bristles at a plant in Arlington, New Jersey. They replaced boar hair imported from Siberia, Poland and China. DuPont made the bristle; Weco, which held exclusive rights to it until 1940, made Dr. West’s Miracle Tuft brush. Hagley calls it “the first toothbrush to employ nylon bristles”; “first” is Hagley’s word.

The dated document is a patent, and it needs care. US Patent 2,130,948, “Synthetic fiber”, was applied for on 9 April 1937 and granted on 20 September 1938, seven months after Hagley’s production date. It never names a toothbrush. It says that “Filaments having diameters ranging from 0.003 to 0.060 inch are especially suitable as bristles” and that “The bristles had good snap, flexibility, and toughness”, and its claim 53 reads: “A brush containing bristles which are obtainable by condensation polymerization from a diamine and a dibasic carboxylic acid.” It has no drawing. The toothbrush link is Hagley’s.

By the 1950s, 80 percent of toothbrushes had nylon bristles, by the account of the University of the Pacific’s dental museum. In November 1941 a Wellington paper reported that nylon would reach New Zealand first as toothbrush bristles, and a chemist’s advert promised nylon tufts that would not go soggy.

The stories that don’t hold up

“The toothbrush was invented in China in 1498.”

The University of the Pacific’s dental museum says only that it is “thought to have originated in China in 1498”, and gives no source. Hangzhou had toothbrush shops two centuries earlier, the brushes of 1291 were horse-tail hair, and Ch’oe Pu saw southerners carrying toothbrushes in 1488 (all above).

“William Addis invented the toothbrush in 1780.”

Anthony Wood owed for a tooth brush in 1691, and in 1778 John Hunter listed brushing among the common methods (above). By the Pacific museum’s account, the manufacture of a toothbrush with a cow-bone handle and boar bristle began in England in 1780; it names no maker.

“Early toothbrushes were pig bristle.”

Not always. Chinese brushes of 1291 were horse-tail hair; England’s factory brushes of 1780 were boar bristle (Pacific), and before 1938 most toothbrushes were boar hair, the dearer ones badger or horsehair (Hagley).

“Romans cleaned their teeth with urine.”

Catullus mocks one Celtiberian: “in the Celtiberian land early in the morning they piss and scrub their teeth and pinky gums with it” (poem 39, tr. Leonard C. Smithers, 1894). Diodorus Siculus says the Celtiberians washed their bodies with urine and cleaned their teeth with it (5.33.5). Apuleius calls it “the filthy fashion in vogue among the Iberians” (tr. Butler). None of the three says it of Romans.

“Romans used mouse brains as toothpaste.”

Pliny puts mouse-head ash in a dentifrice, as “some persons” prefer (Natural History 28.49). The mouse brains are a remedy for delirium, and of that one he asks “who could possibly do it” (30.29).

“The toothbrush was nylon’s first product.”

Hagley says the bristles were one of nylon’s first consumer uses. Nylon yarn for stockings followed in December 1939.

“Siwak sticks were dug up at Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Etruscan sites.”

The Pacific museum says so without a source. The 2021 review says only that the stick was “used by various civilizations”.