Many of the older people are suffering from the agony of decayed and abscessed teeth. All their lives they have been eating the gritty corn bread that has come from the soft grinding stones. As a result, their teeth are badly ground away; sometimes they are ground down to the gums. With the loss of the tooth enamel, decay has come and now aching and abscessed teeth are the result. Here is an old fellow with a great cavity in each molar; half of them are throbbing with pain as the cold air hits the exposed nerves. Here is an old man suffering the agony of three abscessed upper teeth; at night he walks the floor moaning with pain. This old fellow’s lower right canine tooth developed a cystoid abscess; it has eaten through his cheek causing an ugly running sore on his face. In one house is an old woman who long ago lost all her teeth; years of chewing on her gums have caused them to recede until now her nose and chin almost touch. Yonder is an old man who for months has had an aching molar. In order to ease the pain he has been chewing on the other side and now those teeth are so badly ground away that they too are aching. So it is throughout the city. Decayed, abscessed and impacted teeth, pyorrhea and other dental ailments are common. The medicine men have little success in their efforts to combat the agony of an aching or abscessed tooth. Finally, if the patient can no longer bear the pain, the tooth is extracted and in this the suffering person has two choices. One method is to knock the tooth out. One end of a piece of bone or hard wood is placed against the base of the tooth and an obliging neighbor taps the other end sharply with a stone axe. Instantly the tooth is gone! The other method of extraction is equally simple. A long, strong piece of sinew is obtained and one end is tied securely around the aching tooth. The other end of the sinew is tied to a large rock. Then the rock is thrown away. And with it goes the tooth! If the patient is unable to face the drastic extraction, the tooth is simply allowed to abscess and slough away. Sometimes an aged person loses every tooth in this manner. One after another they abscess and slough out until at last the helpless victim is able to relax in the blessed state of painless toothlessness.