Hello and welcome to We Are History and it's a painful one today, not just because John's

going to be leading on it. Thank you for your supporters ever, Angela. No, I'm really nervous about this one,

John, because this is playing into a real phobia of mine, but I'm going to be a brave girl. I hope I get a

brave girl sticker at the end of it, a little lollipop, sugar-free. Because we're not talking

battles or treaties today. It's not kings and queens or politicians and statesmen. Although

nobody was exempt from one of the greatest scourges of mankind down the centuries, we are talking about

teeth, bad teeth, rotten teeth, how people dealt with them. We are doing a history of dentistry.

And I like those episodes when we do how the ordinary people lived in the olden days, what they did

with their sewage or what they did for

contraception. Yeah, you just like poor and sex jokes. That's what you like. Yes. It's probably

that. My source of this episode was an excruciating history of dentistry by James Windbrandt.

Can I just say, I think you're terribly brave reading that book because I would have seen the title of that book and gone absolutely no way.

Thank you very much.

And I'm not squeamish when it comes to, you know, used to be a nurse, blood and guts I can deal with.

But there's something about dentists.

You hate it.

Yeah.

Lawrence Olivier and Marathon Man, it does it for you with a drill and a strapped into the chair. I'm going to take my earphones off while you say that.

Well, what I'd say about this subject is it an issue that really affected everybody for thousands of years.

Yet you hardly ever see it in period dramas or read about it in the history books.

How many days must have been ruined down the centuries by toothache with no cure.

How many days?

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