DOES THE CUTTING OF TEETH IN INFANCY CAUSE FEVER?
T. E. C. JR. M.D.
Sir George Frederic Still (1868-1941) was England's foremost pediatrician during the first quarter of this century. His textbook, Common Disorders and Diseases of Children, is probably the most meticulously written pediatric textbook in the English language. In it Still writes about his personal observations resulting from years of intimate, clinical contact with thousands of infants and children. Contrary to what we are told today, Still wrote as follows about dentition as a cause of fever:
I have already expressed my opinion that the worry of dentition is sometimes the sole cause of fever in infants: I know only too well that this is dangerous doctrine, for it is likely to be abused; but nonetheless it is, I think, a fact as well proved by experience as most scientific observations in clinical medicine, that in some infants the temperature will rise to 102° or 103° when a tooth is nearing eruption and will fall to normal within a few hours after the tooth is cut, and this without any other ascertainable cause for the fever. Lancing the gums is out of fashion nowadays, and probably deservedly so, for no doubt far more mischief and pain was produced by indiscriminate gum-lancing than was caused by the dentition which it was supposed to assist, but although I have never personally had the courage of my conviction to proceed to gum-lancing, I strongly suspect that there are cases in which the fever could be stopped speedily by judicious lancing of the gum when the tooth is at the point of eruption, and unless most of the writers of half a century ago were extremely bad observers, their experience proves that this is so.
