Saint Apollonia

Apollonia was among a group of virgin martyrs killed in Alexandria during a local uprising against Christians before the empire-wide persecution under Decius began. Church tradition holds that her torturers violently extracted or shattered every tooth in her mouth. That singular brutality attached her name to dental suffering for centuries after, and she became the saint invoked by anyone with a toothache. French court painter Jehan Fouquet later captured the scene in The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, fixing the image in devotional art. She remains the patroness of dentistry — a profession born…