Forget the dentist, just suck on a live frog like granny

DO YOU dread a trip to the dentist? Well, count your blessings because our forebears weren’t so lucky.

They had to resort to putting a live frog in their mouth or taking a tooth from a corpse – and these ‘cures’ were common for toothache as late as the 19th and the last century in Ireland.

Sucking cloves and drinking water from holy wells were also among the many treatments that did the trick for one of the most common ailments of this time, according to new research by Dublin City University.

Packing the infected tooth with tobacco was also done, while inhaling hot smoke worked for others, owing to the common (and chilling) belief that toothache was caused by a ‘tooth-worm’.

More pragmatically, salt and water were two of the most widely-used cures but, more bizarrely, a potato carried around in your pocket was believed to work as an amulet to ward off toothache.

Placing a frog in the sufferer’s mouth and repeating religious blessings was founded on a belief around the healing powers of the frog, while interaction with water came from the idea that it could draw away pain from the sufferer by transference, according to the research.

The research was conducted by Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and Human Sciences in DCU Dr Carol Barron and her research assistant Tiziana Soverino. Dr Barron said: ‘The sampling of a large national folklore survey identifies the importance of folk cures for toothache, the third most commonly recorded ailment at this time in Irish society.

‘It is a fascinating insight into the social culture at this time and also the transmission of ancient wisdoms and folk cures from one generation to another.

‘All of the remedies should be set against the wider social and historical background to which they belonged and to notice how embedded they were in everyday life. The same cures were used quite frequently across the 26 counties with some minor variations, but overall there was a consistent trend.

‘It is also interesting to note that the data was collected in a pre-antibiotic era and also with a very low number of dentists operating in Ireland then.’

For this research, Dr Barron and Mr Soverino analysed narratives in the School’s Collection, which is the largest collection of medical folklore in Europe and collected in Ireland in 1937 to 1938.

Of the 6,847 cures in this collection 405 were for toothache and classified under: plant and mineral cures, quasi-medical cures, and magico-reliogious cures.