General discussion about dental treatment and dental medicines

Dental medicines are either protective or curative. Since the substance of teeth is dry, medicines that are useful for keeping teeth healthy and returning them in most cases to their proper condition are drying medicines. As for hot and cold medicines, they are needed for a disease that is caused by one of these qualities of the nature of the teeth. The most suitable medicines for teeth are those that are drying and balanced in relation to both other qualities.

Every dental medicine dries, except that which is used for the tooth not because it is dental, but as a result of an incoming disease that has befallen the tooth.. Further, drying medicines are either hot dry or cold dry. The best of dental medicines is one that, along with drying and absorbing moisture, adds shine, moderately dissolves excess if it rushes to the tooth, and prevents matter from seeping into the tooth. Cold and drying medicines and medicines that are cold and do not set one’s teeth on edge with their acidity or astringency, as sour grape juice or the acid of citron does set one’s teeth on edge, these are succus, camphor, sandalwood, rose and its seeds, pomegranate flower, dragon’s blood, tamarisk fruit, galls, amber , pearls, betel nut, barley flour, mulberry bast, tamarisk leaves and sorrel root.

As for hot and lukewarm medicines, some of them have heat in their substance, while others have it acquired. Those with warmth in the substance are, for example, burnt salt, burnt citvar wormwood, live and burnt sap, Chinese cinnamon, hyssop, fragrant rush flowers, caper fruits, the bark of their roots is more powerful, aloe wood, musk, live Venus hair and burnt, cypress and juniper leaves, sadaj, antler burnt and unburnt, mint and its ash, mastic, burnt glass, ash of bavrak and round aristolochia, ash of vine bark, ash of burnt hare's head and burnt dates. Medicines that are hot in their acquired capacity are, for example, the ash of the Gauls, which, if extinguished with vinegar, is closer to balance, as well as ash from grape stems, ash from reeds, and the like.

As for the balanced ones, this is, for example, burnt deer antler, if it is washed, or, say, sycamore nuts, or, for example, bast of a pine tree.

This also includes drugs obtained by combination. For example, barley flour, if you knead it with salt and maysusan and then burn it, as well as dates mixed with kitran. They are burned until they turn into coal, then sprinkled with maysusan.

Among the tested medicinal powders for rubbing teeth are the following: burnt deer antler ten dirhams, cypress leaves ten dirhams, sycamore nuts as they are five, creeping cinquefoil root ten, burnt Venus hair five, roses without petioles three, sumbula three. All this is ground finely and made into powder. Another powder:   take burnt deer horn, kazmazak, syti, roses, aromatic sumbul, each worth a dirham, and Andarani salt, a quarter of a dirham, and make a powder from all this. We will also mention other powders in subsequent paragraphs and in the Pharmacopoeia.

And now we will say: dental treatment with drying medicines is a treatment, as you have learned, that is appropriate in all cases, but treatment with warming and cooling medicines is required when the nature strongly deviates from its characteristic balance. Dental medicines include powders, chewable medicines, thick ointments and sticky lozenges on the teeth or jaw, rubbing, cauterizing, tooth-removing medicines, fumigations, nasal products, drops in the nose and ear, and evacuation of matter using bloodletting or cupping through the area closest to the teeth.

Among dental medicines there are those that dissolve, those that cool, and those that cause numbness. Numbing agents, if applied directly to the teeth, are far from dangerous, but frequent use sometimes damages the substance of the teeth. Also, medicines that strongly dissolve and warm should not be used except when necessary; such as, for example, coloquint, harbak, mad cucumber and others. You should be careful that some of these medications, as well as medications that cause numbness, do not get ingested.

Often it is necessary to drill a tooth with a thin drill so that the matter that causes suffering comes out of it and so that the medicines find a passage deep into the tooth. Vinegar, although it is harmful to teeth, is found in dental medicines, both cooling and warming: in cooling ones because it cools the substance of the tooth and penetrates into it, and in warming ones because it penetrates into the tooth and, breaking apart, promotes dissolution. As for the harmfulness of vinegar, it is weakened by dental medicines that are mixed with it.