"With this apparatus regularly and daily used, the teeth and gums will be preserved free from disease."
Levi Spear Parmly
Appalled by the terrible condition of his patients' teeth, U.S. dentist Levi Spear Parmly (1790-1859) was spurred into promoting the use of what is now called dental floss. He encouraged people to clean between their teeth using a thin piece of waxen silk thread, and even went so far as to state that flossing combined with the use of a toothbrush and dentrifice would eliminate bacteria from the gums. While this might have been a slight exaggeration, the use of dental floss is today widely recognized as one of the most important, and least utilized, forms of oral hygiene.
The practice of cleaning between the teeth with thread or small picks is one that predates Spear Parmly, but he reinvented the procedure and the tools to do it, and publicized the beneficial effects of flossing. His influential book, A Practical Guide to the Management of the Teeth, was published in 1819. In it, he advised flossing after every meal.
Despite Spear Parmly's sound words, dental floss was slow to take off and was not mass-produced until Codman and Shurtleft patented their floss in 1874. But it was the Johnson & Johnson Corporation that was responsible for the widest distribution of dental floss, created from the same silk thread used in surgical suture production. In around 1900 the Johnson & Johnson Corporation bought Codman and Shurtleft, which remains an active division of the company.
