On the discovery of cementum

Though cementum of the tooth root is critical for periodontal structure and tooth attachment and function, this tissue was not discovered and characterized on human teeth until a full century later than enamel and dentin. Early observations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries by Marcello Malpighi, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Blake, Jacques Tenon and Georges Cuvier founded a confusing and conflicting nomenclature that obscured the nature of cementum, often conflating it with bone. Advances in microscopy and histological procedures yielded the first detailed descriptions of human cementum in the 1830s by Jan Purkinje and Anders Retzius, who identified for the first time acellular and cellular types of cementum, and the resident cementocytes embedded in the latter. Comparative anatomy studies by Richard Owen and others over the latter half of the nineteenth century identified coronal and radicular cementum varieties across the Reptilia and Mammalia. The functional importance of cementum was not appreciated until detailed anatomical studies of the periodontium were performed by G.V. Black and others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These early studies on cementum laid the foundation for more advanced understanding of cementum ultrastructure, composition, development, physiology, disease, genetics, repair and regeneration throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.