If you’ve ever read the classic narrative, “Our Southern Highlanders” by Horace Kephart then you probably know what tooth-jumping is. You should also be thankful that you never had to experience it first hand, although in some cases it may have been the less painful option.

In many areas of the Appalachians good medical and dental care was hard to come by in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kephart stated that when he lived in the North Carolina Smokies there was no doctor within sixteen miles and the ones that were nearby had never attended a medical school.

So when a mountaineer was stricken with a severe toothache there was really only one option…have it removed. In those days, without any qualified dentists around and with anaesthetics virtually non-existant the affected tooth needed to be removed as quickly as possible.  Pulling them out with pliers was probably the most common method of removing the tooth but tooth-jumping became an option mainly because, when done right, it was faster and inflicted less pain on the patient.

Horace Kephart has it described to him below in the following excerpt from his book, “Our Southern Highlanders”.

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Our Southern Highlanders

It was hear that I first heard of “tooth-jumping.”  Let one of my old neighbors tell it in his own way:

“You take a cut nail (not one o’ those round wire nails) and place it squar p’int agin the ridge of the tooth, jest under the edge of the gum. Then jump the tooth out with a hammer. A man who knows how can jump a tooth without it hurtin’ half as bad as pullin’. But old Uncle Neddy Cyarter went to jump one of his own teeth out, one time, and missed the nail and mashed his nose with the hammer. He had the weak trembles.”

“I have heard of tooth-jumping,” said I, “and reported it to dentists back home, but they laughed at me.”

“Well, they needn’t laugh; for it’s so. Some men git to be as experienced at it as tooth-dentists are at pullin’. They cut around the gum, and then put the nail at jest sich an angle, slantin’ downward for an upper tooth, or upwards for a lower one, and hit one lick.”

“Will the tooth come at the first lick?”

“Ginerally. If it didn’t, you might as well stick your head in a swarm o’ bees and fergit who you are.”

“Are back teeth extracted that way?”

“Yes, sir; any kind of tooth. I’ve burnt my holler out with a red-hot wire.”

“Good God!”

“Hit’s so. The wire’d sizzle like fryin’.”

“Kill the nerve?”

“No, but it’d sear the mar so it wouldn’t be so sensitive.”

“Didn’t hurt, eh?”

“Hurt like hell  for a moment. I held the wire one time for Jim Bob Jimwright, who couldn’t reach the spot for hisself. I told him to hold his tongue back; but when I touched the holler he jumped and wropped his tongue agin the wire. The words that man used ain’t fitty to tell.”