Returning to the indications for the extraction of teeth, Fauchard says that when a tooth planted irregularly in the mouth cannot be straightened by any of those means to which he afterward alludes, and occasions damage or inconvenience or constitutes a deformity, the sole remedy is its removal. As to decayed teeth and the pain that they produce, when the evil cannot be remedied with oil of cinnamon or oil of cloves, with the actual cautery, or by stopping, one must have recourse to extraction, and this to satisfy four different indications, that is, before all, to procure the cessation of violent pain; in the second place, to prevent the caries from being communicated to the neighboring teeth; thirdly, to remove the fetid smell deriving from the substances that are retained within the carious cavity, and to impede the teeth on the same side from becoming covered with tartar, as inevitably happens when by reason of painfulness in eating they are forced to be inactive; fourth and lastly, because the dental caries, not infrequently gives rise to other diseases, which ordinarily cannot be cured unless the cause from which it arises be recognized and suppressed. “Sometimes,” continues Fauchard, “such violent and obstinate pain arises in a tooth that we are obliged to extract it, although not decayed nor presenting deformity.” The author combats the old prejudice, that it is not right to draw teeth in cases of pregnant women or of nursing mothers, lest the operation should prove dangerous to the patient or to the fetus, or produce alteration or arrest of the milk secretion. Only the fear arising from this prejudice can, according to the author, cause any of the dreaded contingencies. The dentist ought, therefore, to seek to dissipate the fears of these patients, by persuading them of the innocuous nature of the operation as well as of its short duration, and should represent to them, on the other hand (if the operation be really necessary), the advantages of promptly deciding on it, to avoid the harm and the peril that prolonged suffering and the tortures of sleeplessness might occasion to themselves as well as to the unborn child or to the suckling infant, such as abortion, premature confinement, alteration of the milk, etc. According to Fauchard, “one should always take the precaution of hiding the instruments from the patient’s sight, especially in the case of extracting a tooth, so as not to terrify him.”