This author relates a clinical case tending to demonstrate how incisions made in the gums, advised in the first place by Vesalius, in order to facilitate the erupting of the last molar, are not always exempt from danger. A young doctor of Amsterdam, by name Goswin Hall, being tormented by insupportable pain caused by the difficult eruption of a wisdom tooth, had the gum lanced above it. But the pain, instead of diminishing, became worse; fever and delirium supervened, followed by death! (Here, however, we must be allowed to observe that nothing demonstrates that the real cause of death was the lancing of the gum, or that without this the case would have had a different termination. An event can occur after another and yet be quite independent of the former and result from quite different causes.) Among the cases cited by Tulp, the following is also worthy of mention. He relates having arrested a violent and persistent attack of hemorrhage, which came on after the extraction of a tooth, by applying and compressing a piece of sponge inside the alveolus.[348] The belief that dental caries and toothache could be caused by worms was, at that time, still in full vigor, and it gained still greater force by reason of observations recorded by different scientists, whose affirmations could with difficulty be doubted, for at that period the greater number still swore blindly _in verba magistri_. OLIGERUS JACOBAENS (1650 to 1701), a Danish physician and anatomist, who taught in the University of Copenhagen, declared that in scraping the decayed cavity of a tooth that was the cause of violent pain, he had seen a worm come forth, which, having been put into water, moved about in it for a long time. MARTIN SIX, having split some decayed teeth a short time after they had been extracted, asserts that he determined the existence of worms in them. (It is probable that this observer, as well as others, mistook the dental pulp for a worm, an unpardonable error, in truth, at a time when the anatomical constitution of the teeth had already been very well studied by several scientists, and especially by the celebrated Bartolomeo Eustachius.) GABRIEL CLAUDER (1633 to 1691) not only believed in dental worms, but maintained besides that these were the most frequent among all the causes of toothache. In a certain way, to sustain this opinion of his, he relates a case in which a tooth of healthy appearance being the seat of great pain, a tooth-drawer had asserted that there must be a worm in its interior; and, in fact, on the tooth being extracted and afterward split, the little animal whose existence the tooth-drawer had divined, was found to be existing inside of it! PHILIP SALMUTH asserts that by using rancid oil he got a worm out of the decayed tooth of a person suffering from violent toothache, thus causing the cessation of the pain. The worm, he says, was an inch and a half in length (!) and similar in form to a cheese maggot.