hile her friends lost their false hair. Fillings of
many kinds were used, dentrifices of nearly every kind were invented,
and dentistry evidently reached a high stage of development, though we
have nowhere a special name for dentist, and the work seems to have been
done by physicians, who took this as a specialty.

While in the Middle Ages there was, owing to conditions, a loss of much
of this knowledge of antiquity with regard to dentistry, or an
obscuration of it, it never disappeared completely, and whenever men
have written seriously about medicine, above all about surgery in
relation to the face and the mouth, the teeth have come in for their
share of scientific and practical consideration. Aetius, the first
important Christian writer on medicine and surgery, discusses, as we
have seen in the sketch of him, the nutrition of the teeth, their
nerves, "which came from the third pair and entered the teeth by a small
hole existing at the end of the root," and other interesting details of
anatomy and physiology. He knows much about the hygiene of the teeth,
discusses extraction and the cure of fistula and other details. Paul of
AEgina in the next century has much more, and while they both quote
mainly from older authors there seems no doubt that they themselves had
made not a few observations and had practical experience.

It was from these men that the Arabian physicians and surgeons obtained
their traditions of medicine, and so it is not surprising to find that
they discuss dental diseases and their treatment rationally and in
considerable detail. Abulcasis particularly has much that is of
significance and interest. We have pictures of two score of dental
instruments that were used by them. The Arabs not only treated and
filled carious teeth and even replaced those that were lost, but they
also corrected deformities of the mouth and of the dental arches.
Orthodontia is sometimes said to be of much later origin and to begin
many centuries after Abulcasis' time, yet no one who knows of his work
can speak of Orthodontia as an invention after him. In this, however, as
in most of the departments of medicine and surgery, the Arabs were
merely imitators, though probably they expanded somewhat the practical
knowledge that had come to them.

When the great revival in surgery came in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries it is not surprising that there should also have been an
important renewal of interest in dentistry. A detai