St. Apollonia

Who they were

Apollonia is that rarity among early martyrs, a victim we know from a contemporary document: the letter of her own bishop, Dionysius of Alexandria, describing the anti Christian riot that swept his city in 249.

She was, he writes, an aged virgin, likely a deaconess, seized by the mob, who beat her jaw and broke out her teeth, then built a pyre and threatened to burn her alive unless she repeated their blasphemies. Given a moment as if considering, she stepped into the fire herself. That step troubled even the ancients. Augustine took up the question of whether it was suicide, and answered for her, that a readiness of this kind counted as obedience rather than despair. The devotion drew the practical conclusion: the woman whose teeth were the site of her suffering became the intercessor for everyone's, and for a thousand years the toothached prayed to Apollonia before they ever saw a barber surgeon. Dentists worldwide still claim her, and her image, pincers holding a tooth, hangs in dental schools.

Why people turn to St. Apollonia

Toothache at two in the morning, the extraction, the root canal, and the child's first dentist visit. And the dental professionals themselves, who have kept her feast alive in their guilds.

How to ask their intercession

Plainly, and alongside the appointment rather than instead of it. An aged woman who feared the mob less than you fear the drill is good company in the waiting room.