Quicksilver Quacks

摘要

The Crawcour brothers recognised a get-rich-quick scheme when they saw one. Fast, cheap fillings were guaranteed to turn a pretty profit. And just as they expected to make a killing, the brothers also expected to make a few enemies. What they didn't expect was all-out war.rnSince the earliest times, people have stopped up holes in teeth with fragments of coral, wads of cloth, plugs of cork, waxes and gums, and later with various types of cement. Most of these fillings fell out within days. By the 18th century, French dentists had begun to experiment with metal fillings, battering lead or thin foils of tin and gold into the cavity with a mallet. Even these didn't last. Bacteria slipped into the tiny gaps around the filling and decay began again. Then, in 1826, Frenchman Auguste Taveau began to plug cavities with "silver paste", an amalgam of silver and mercury. The silver dissolved in the liquid mercury to form a soft paste that could be worked into a hole of any shape. Once in the cavity, the paste crystallised into a hard plug.