FINGER PRINTS AS FORCEPS.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15129, 21 February 1922, Page 3

FINGER PRINTS AS FORCEPS.

The work of old-fashioned Chinese dentists is ludicrously primitive, writes a traveller. The operator extracts all teeth with his fingers. From youth to manhood he is trained to pull pegs from a wooden board and this training changes the aspect of the hand, and gives him a finger grip that is equivalent to a lifting power of three or four hundred pounds. For toothache he employs opium, peppermint, oil, cinnamon oil. Sometimes he fills teeth, but he does it so poorly that the fillings fall out after a few months. There is an element of superstition in his work, for he asserts that all dental troubles are brought on by tooth worms and he always shows the nerve pulp to the patient as such a worm For humbugging purposes, also, the dentist carries about in his pocket some white grubs, and after he has extracted a tooth he shows a grub to the sufferer as the cause of all the trouble. A dentist of this class is re garded by his countrymen as halfway between a barber and a labourer in the social scale, which is certainly a great injustice to an honest labourer.