Whether it’s batteries or exploding teeth, contemplating things that explode is disarmingly easy when we’re living in the age of rage. Often without warning and generally for very little discernible reason, people have become like beer bombs, exploding all over the place in a laundry stacked with homemade brew in stolen milk crates. Not even out in the open – mostly on their own, fingers a-keyboard, staring at a screen.
Up until the late 1990s, there were few reasons for people to become completely enraged in public.
Even if you did, it was likely to be somewhere you frequented or would eventually need to return. Either for work, social or reasons of sole agency in terms of a particular product or brand. With all its infuriating and fallible systems IT was yet to rule, leaving most decisions and determinations to humans who, for the most part, were very obliging. Customer satisfaction and good will amounted to more than a succession of emailed surveys. Companies had the intention of retaining staff with all their knowledge and experience.
They nurtured loyalty through quality training, good treatment and feeling of being valued.
Fuel was only 58c a litre and yet road rage became a thing. Some would argue a media concoction, really – since driving’s always been a risky biz. Either way, some people suddenly began mastering impatience and arrogant indifference on the road. Newspaper reports of angry people throwing punches in traffic had decent folks looking askance and wondering where civility had gone. Maybe they were frustratingly delayed on their way to a dental appointment. Who knows – but it made the news.
In high income countries, since the end of the 1950s more families than not, own a car. Road improvements, safer vehicles, legislation, and advances in medical care and equipment have reduced death and serious injury on the road. However, over the long term these two things have remained relatively consistent because human behaviour broadly responds to these safety improvements by driving more recklessly.
We do the same with dentistry. As methods, procedures and accessibility continue making advancements, sugar and ultra processed foods consumption increases. Both are known to be highly detrimental to good oral health. Yet exploding teeth are not one of their by-products.
Although Homo sapiens is Latin for ‘wise human’, unlike New York, modern humans (ergo Homo sapiens sapiens) are not so good that we had to be named twice. As a species we’re not particularly renowned for reacting and behaving on the basis of rationale – pain, fear and lust hastily elbow reason out of the way much of the time.
Under the strict rules of the Linnaean taxonomy system, the reason we are Homo sapiens sapiens (not a typo) the first subspecies (of which we are: genus Homo, species sapiens) is designated by the convention of repeating the species name. Don’t take it as an indicator of being the wisest of wise: the general ecological, political and economic state of the planet and its people tells us that.
In 2022 revered British journalist, author and documentary maker Louis Theroux had a novelty rap he’d written in 2000 excavated, remixed and TikTok-released. ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ was a viral smash; heard 1.4 billion times and named one of the most-played songs of that year. Theroux succinctly deemed the song’s popularity as “a baffling 21st century example of just the weirdness of the world that we live in”.
Part of that weirdness is this default position of rage we have.
It’s a phenomenon that hatched near the turn of this new millennium. So much has it snaked and fattened over the preceding two-and-a-half decades that much like the life-freedoms we know we had prior to mobile phones, 9/11, social media, and COVID-19 they’re getting harder to recall. And not simply the finer details. It’s all so unanchored to the present parameters and the internet has greatly dissolved the art of vivid recollection.
Why remember what Google will give 390,000,000 search results for? Does truth matter when we barely recognise it?
Corporations monetise every second of people’s lives with relentless collecting, analysing and selling of user information. Waking hours have become extended, and with that a bombardment of advertising across media platforms, physical surfaces and un-skippable video commercials. Endless apps clamour for taps. Clicks, looks, scrolls, likes, hearts, ratings, trolling, shaming and piling-on are the new language of the connected disconnected, who specialise in free-range indignation, hate and fury.
It’s a whole virtual village that you don’t want raising a child.
A dichotomy of barefaced anonymity, skilled ineptitude and stagnant agitation. It’s overwhelming. No wonder anxiety and depression are so prevalent. With just one degree between fear and anger, it’s this widespread nervousness that has allowed outrage and irritation to become acceptable in a way the 1980s could never have nurtured, nor have ever approved.
It’s hardly mysterious – we can see how we got here.
What is mysterious, is whether or not teeth to actually explode.
According to 19th century Pennsylvania dentist and first president of the American Dental Association, William Henry Atkinson, there was an “outbreak” of exploding teeth – which comprised three of his patients. A few later instances were, however, reported by other dentists – all of them occuring in the US. It’s never been uncommon for decayed teeth to sometimes split – but for them to go off with a bang was unheard of.
In 1871 a young woman had a spectacular end to the toothache she’d been suffering. Apparently the molar, “… bursted with a concussion … that well-nigh knocked her over” with the resultant explosion so loud, she was deafened for a number of days. The first of Atkinson’s patients – after having spent all night “walking the floor in wild delirium” with the sheer torture of the dental pain – experienced “…all at once a sharp crack, like a pistol shot, bursting his tooth to fragments, (giving) him instant relief.”
Gruesome.
At the time, Atkinson suggested that decay could have created a gas build-up, eventually making the tooth fracture. Modern dentistry asserts this as highly unlikely, given that no amount of gas could sufficiently accumulate in a tooth to cause it to explode. In the 1800s it was thought that cavities formed inside teeth, rather than understanding the causes being predominantly diet, and pathogens in the biofilm on the surface of the teeth.
There’s no evidence that any of these patients had fillings, but one theory centres on the variety of metals used to fill cavities prior to the 1830s, when mercury amalgam began being used.
A professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, once explained that if two different metals had been used, it would create an electrochemical cell; meaning that the whole mouth would effectively become a low-voltage battery. With any mix of lead, silver, tin or alloys that were used by dentists then, if a filling were badly done leaving part of the cavity hollow, there’s the possibility of amassed hydrogen and its accompanying pressure blowing out the tooth.
It’s no surprise that W.H. Atkinson didn’t come up with that hypothesis considering the original three patients were all his, and he did make mention of decay.
All in all, and more than two hundred years later, it’s inconclusive as to what had the Victorians a-twitter with firing tooth fragments. Maybe the symptoms were much less eventful, and rather more prosaic. Maybe T.S. Eliot was right with the disillusionment and spiritual emptiness in his post-war poem ‘The Hollow Men’ in that the end “was not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Could be that that this is precisely the way the world – as we knew it – ended. And it left us festering, fractured, fuming and ready to explode.
We really have to right that wrong. There’s no triumph in anger, no progress in populism and we are an entire world of village idiots when there are 7-year-olds being prescribed antidepressants.
