Prehistoric period
The prehistoric period covers the Paleolithic and Neolithic period, which
extends into the evolution of humanity before the existence of the written
document. It begins with the articulation
of language, development of the thumb and construction of different
instruments. Man remained in the woods,
ate fruit and roots, made use of fire, and hunted with sledgehammers, spears,
bows and arrows. They begin to cluster,
to develop subsistence items such as wooden vases, to hand-weave and braid
items, to domesticate and rear animals.
Prehistoric man began laying the framework for technical and
environmental transformation with metal working tool
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages comprises the period from the year 476, with the fall of theRoman Empire, to the 1640 Revolution with the English.
Abu al-Qasim was born in 936 in Medina Azahara (Cordova). In the tenth century he wrote the following
about the means of placing an implant: "On occasion, when one or two teeth
have fallen, they can recover again in the alveoli by joining them in the
manner indicated (with gold threads) to keep them in place. This operation should be done with great
delicacy by skillful hands."
Implantology is a specialty of dentistry that
deals with planning, placement and maintenance of dental implants. Implants are prosthetic devices or substances
that are placed in the body to improve how something works or for aesthetic
purposes. This field of dentistry deals
with the replacement of missing teeth, through the installation of titanium
poles, as if they were roots within the socket bone, which then carry
artificial teeth designed for that purpose, near the area of the dental
occlusion.
The first prosthesis that have been found were not
a natural or artificial tooth attached to the neighbors, as has been found in
Egyptian or Phoenician skulls, but were an introduction of necrotic tissue
conducted during the Neolithic period.
The discovery took place in the town ofFaida Souard
(Algeria). The skull was found by a young woman, which
presented a fragment of phalanx of a finger inserted in the alveoli of the
second premolar upper right.
Old Age
This period starts with the invention of writing, in approximately 4000 BC, and
ends with the fall of theRoman Empire in 476
AD.
The remotest anthropological remains with dental implants placed "in
vivo" are of Mayan culture. The
archaeologist Popenoe, in 1931, discovered a jaw in the Playa de los Muertos of
Honduras which dates back to 400 AD. The
jaw had three shell fragments introduced into the alveoli of the incisors. The radiological studies identified compact
bone formation around the implants, so one can assume that these fragments were
introduced in life. The idea to use the
alveoli as a carrier for artificial teeth is very old, as happens in other
techniques of medicine. There is no
evidence that Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks or Romans made such techniques.
During this period,
surgeon barbers, due to the demands of the nobles and military rank, fashioned
dental transplants using teeth of the commoners, servants and soldiers as
donors. Subsequently, these practices
were abandoned due to continuing failures and the possibility of disease
transmission. This was emphasized by the
surgeon Ambroise Pare (1510-1590), as published in 1572 in Cinq Livres de Chirurgie, which treated many and varied issues of
oral surgery and dentistry in general.
Besides working on reintroduction, dental instrumentation was enriched
with the invention of the jaw-lever, the trigger and the pelican. A century after, Duval will differ from his
predecessors by taking the precaution of removing the flesh and replacing it
with lead or gold leaf.
Until the eighteenth century there were no fundamental changes in traditional
surgical knowledge of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but at the end of
this period modern scientific culture starts, which is accentuated with
broadcasts and illustrations.
