The medieval medical fascination with dead bodies spread deep into dentistry. According to Mental Floss, people from England would wear bags of teeth taken from corpses around their necks to prevent toothaches. Others would simply rub the corpse tooth against their own, applying directly to the afflicted area like the most morbid form of roll-on pain relief. This all stemmed from the general consensus that “like cures like,” where the best way to heal a body part was to use the exact same body part. Since most people weren’t too keen to give away their teeth, it left the sets of pearly whites lying 6 feet under as the next best option.

Sometimes other corpse parts were introduced to help heal teeth. In Ireland, it was believed that rubbing the gums above a hurting tooth with the finger from a cadaver would ease the pain; if that didn’t work, then washing it with water was said to help. If that sounds like the first reasonable medical treatment, don’t worry, the water also had to have washed a dead body. It’s a wonder how far the world of medicine and dentistry has come.