Dear Cohort,
I’m guilty of not contributing to my blog as much as I would have liked to over the past few days.
You see, at the Consortium (that suspiciously-named academic organisation that, by name at least, seems to be masquerading as a group of oil magnates) we have started our new course on St. Paul and it’s been causing me no end of trouble and worry. You see, I’m not a religious person and know practically nothing, I’ve come to realise, about one of the bedrocks of my own culture. I’ve been busy, therefore, reading up on it and misunderstanding everything about Christianity and then having the already shaky ground collapse under my misunderstood perceptions when I realise that there are thousands of interpretations on the tiniest parts of everything I’m reading and each of those parts have translations which change the meaning of everything again. There’s no end to the complexity of Theology, it seems. The whole thing is a mess for me and I don’t possess a level of scholarship to enable me to engage with something I know nothing about. The class is moving on very quickly due to the over-representation of American and Canadian Jews who seem to have come into their element in discussing circumcision. I’m left behind. Flagging.
At any rate, as part of our Ph.D., we Consortiumites must write an essay on each of these courses and my St Paul one has been troubling me. I’ve decided to write an essay on resurrection and St. Paul. I would have had to have written about resurrection at some point since that debate is central to anything to do with the body, I would have thought (though I’m not surprised to see it omitted from every history of transplant I’ve ever come across!). I have to focus on St. Paul because of the course’s focus but I hope I can make some headway with that part of my Ph.D. by thinking about differences in how the body is viewed. I’m thinking of comparing two sermons to highlight differences in interpretation in Pauline ideas on the body and resurrection. I have to run this by the course tutor and, perhaps, my supervisor but it seems as though it’s a goer.
So ‘teeth’ have been pushed to the side, somewhat, though I’ve made some headway still.
I spent too much time already looking for medical references. Medical references to the process of tooth transplantation seems to be lacking and I have exhausted everything in the Wellcome Collection that is immediately forthcoming and all the knowledge and expertise of those in charge of the library and museum at the British Dental Association. They were fantastic, by the way, and at one point I had three of them running around looking for things for me. There was only me in the entire museum. It is a saving grace, therefore, that I am studying the poetics so I can look into literature and rhetoric and only lift off from the medical procedures or even fantasies. In the medical examples I have found, I have noticed that there was not only human-to-human transplantation but Charles Allen mentions ‘brute’-to-human transplantation. He suggests a method of detaining a ‘brute’ such as a baboon, sheep, or dog and making a live transplant. I think I may read into this quite a bit, although I’ve only seen it suggested in Allen’s text. Even this suggestion that this may have happened (and no doubt quickly failed!) brings into purview fantasies about tooth transplantations, where certain qualities take root. Take, for example, werewolves and vampires where it is not difficult to see how one might think of a human with animal teeth taking on some of its brutish characteristics.
Then there is the whole world of folk lore concerned with teeth. In Bavaria, if one has tooth ache, one must go to the church yard at midnight and bite the bones of a dead man. In another location, you were meant to rub your tooth with a nail which is then hammered it into a tree. And in quite a few locations (mostly Germanic) a child puts its baby tooth into a mouse hole and asks the mouse to bring a ’stronger’ one. These examples may not appear to be about transplant but they are about how qualities are absorbed by or from the teeth: the pain is meant to travel to the bone or the tree, and the strength of the mouse’s tooth (which, after all, must be strong having made the mouse hole in the first place) is supposed to somehow rub off on the new child’s tooth. This is a transplantation of qualities in the absence of physical transplantation. I am certain of the validity of this link to transplantation, as the absorption of qualities was one of the things that come to define transplantation, though I must work on expanding the argument for it.
If anyone has any tooth stories or any ideas have been sparked, please let me know! 
I’m going to write on resurrection and teeth (separately) in the coming weeks, hopefully returning to my referenced pseudo-essay style. I hope it gives some pleasure!
Tags: animal, brute, Charles Allen, folk lore, poetics, Resurrection, science, st paul, Teeth, tooth, tooth transplantation, transplant, transplantation, xenotransplantation
Paul William Craddock
Dear Paul,
This is very interesting – your course sounds brilliant and scary at the same time, which is, I’m sure, the way it’s supposed to be. You’ve clearly found lots of stuff already on teeth and are off to a flying start. I’ve been reading a book called The Body: A Reader, ed. by Miriam Fraser and Monica Greco (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), and specifically a newly translated essay in it, Georges Canguilhem’s ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’, for my new module starting next week: Monstrous Bodies. You might be interested in bits of this, such as:
In 1826 at Auteil, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had resumed old artificial incubation experiments first tried in Egypt, imitating the techniques used in the famous “chicken ovens”. [ie artificial incubators] The aim of the experiments was to bring about embryonic anomalies. In 1829, drawing a lesson from this research as it related to the question posed by Lamarck’s thesis on the modifications of specific animal types, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire wrote: “I was trying to induce organization down some unusual paths.” Doubtless this decision, inasmuch as it led to operating on bird’s eggs, did not have any grandiose unconscious motivation behind it. But can we say the same of Réamur when, after having recounted at length what he termed the armours of a chicken and a rabbit, he expressed his disappointment that such a bizarre union had not procured for him “fur-covered chickens of feathered rabbits”? What shall we say on the day that we learn that experiments in teratogeny [def. the formation of monsters] have been carried out on humans? […] We are well aware of the distance that lies between biologists creating their object for themselves and those who manufacture human monsters to serve as fairground attractions, such as Victor Hugo described in L’Homme qui rit [The Man Who Laughs]. We must wish for such a distance to be preserved, but we cannot assert that it will be.’
I thought I might give this to the students and see what they make of it… It’ll work well with Frankenstein, one of the texts on the module.
Best,
Sharon
Thanks Sharon, that’s really great of you. I hadn’t come across that book, though there seem to be quite a few about the body and its various parts and members knocking around that I have to come to at some point. The one you recommend does sound particularly delicious, though. I think it’ll be on my Wellcome Trust request list pretty sharpish! I bet your students find the sessions with you an absolute treat!
Oh, and yes the course is very scary. I’m struggling to read everything that’s required of me (which can’t always be made relevant to even the essay I have to write for that particular course) and do the Ph.D. at the same time. I suppose that’s the price you have to pay to grow a comprehensive knowledge. It’s just a little bit too intensive, though. Still, as I think I told you, I’ve never been happier!
I hope your new module goes well!
All my best,
Paul.