Feast day: February 9
St. Apollonia
An elderly deaconess of Alexandria seized in an anti-Christian riot; her teeth were broken in the torture, and she went to her death rather than renounce Christ.
Apollonia was an aged deaconess of Alexandria who died in the year 249, during a savage outbreak of mob violence against the Christians of the city. Our knowledge of her is unusually firm for so early a martyr: it comes from a letter of her own bishop, St. Dionysius of Alexandria, written within a few years of the events.
According to Dionysius, a pagan crowd, stirred up against the Christians, seized Apollonia and beat her so brutally about the face that they broke out all her teeth. They then kindled a fire outside the city and threatened to burn her alive unless she repeated their blasphemies.
Given a moment as if to consider, she instead stepped willingly into the flames herself. This detail troubled later theologians, who debated whether it counted as suicide; the common explanation is that she acted under a special impulse of the Holy Spirit, as the Church has held of certain other martyrs.
Because of the manner of her suffering, Apollonia became the saint invoked against toothache and the patron of dentists, and she is shown in art holding a single tooth in a pair of pincers — one of the most recognizable images in Christian iconography.
Because her teeth were shattered in her martyrdom, she became the patron saint invoked against toothache and of dentists.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/01617c.htm
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