1300 YEARS AGO IMPLANTOLOGY

1300 YEARS AGO IMPLANTOLOGY

I like very much to think that my first news on implantology refers to a find from the 7th and 8th centuries AD. In the museum of archeology and ethnology of Harvard University there is a remnant of the mandible of a female person of about twenty years of age, which brings in the incisor area three cuneiform pieces of shell, well shaped, which replaced three lower incisors. It was radiographically ascertained that they were inserted while this girl was alive and that the bone around the fragments was reconstituted. This person had lived in the Mayan metropolis of Copan (Honduras). It seems that the technique adopted for the insertion was similar to those adopted by Linkow and our prof. Masons. It is easy to hypothesize that the operation took place under anesthesia, given the knowledge of the Maya in the field of narcotics. The first alloplastic implant that has come down to us! Bibliography: Pasqualini M.E. an alloplastic implant in a 1300-year-old mandible. Histological research. Dent Cadmos 2000; 11: 57-62. In the face of those who have been celebrating their implantology 'successes' for twenty years as if they were the wonders of the second millennium.