Dear Friends,
I have hit a problem with the filming of the LitSciMed film: 5 minutes is too little time to do what I wanted to do originally. However, the film will still go ahead but I’ve had to re-structure it quite a bit and re-frame the subject so that the film occupies 5 minutes rather than being squeezed into it; when a boxer sweats, s/he is weak – much better to lop off bits and save them for another day.
I couldn’t wait for another day, though, so I’ve written and expanded upon the information that I prepared to put into the first part of the film and I would like to offer some thoughts about the general significance of the teeth but, rather than merely listing the functions of the teeth, I would like to offer a phenomenological account or texture of them and suggest some ways in which teeth and their loss have been, and might be, experienced. This is an example of how I have come to love English Literature being precursory to any scientific or medical discussion (which forms ‘Part 2′, already written but if I posted it, would give away my film!) I don’t think I could write things like this and get away with them if it wasn’t for things like LitSciMed. I do hope you enjoy it!
Part 1: the General Significance and Experience of Teeth
Image 1: Carroll 1866/2000, 93
‘[...] I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.’
‘All right,’ said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. |
‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!’
(Carroll 1866/2000, 93-94)
As a child, I watched Disney’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I remember most vividly the scene adapted from the above exchange in which the Cheshire Cat disappears slowly. I recall a purple, striped, fat cat perched on the bough of a tree, innately grinning; the pupils of his eyes bobbing around, his straight teeth a glistening white – as Carroll illustrates: ‘grinning from ear to ear’ (Carroll ibid, 82). The smile distinguished the Cat and announced his presence. In fact, later in the tale, Alice spots a disembodied grin at the Queen’s tea party, immediately recognising: ‘it’s the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.’ (Carroll 1866/2000, 123)
The smile, here, is detachable from the rest of the body, which perhaps is not as far-fetched as Caroll’s fantasy might suggest. It has always been the case that those constituent ingredients of the grin or smile, the teeth, fall out once early in life and again with the onset of old age, disease, or accident. One might also recall false teeth with heads absent, chasing cartoon cats and dogs around, or the permanently grinning false teeth in a jar of fluid perched on the side of an elderly person’s night-table. The teeth or the smile introduce one’s face – and this is literally the case for beings such as the Cheshire Cat. But the teeth’s peculiar nature as commonly detachable from the living body, naturally and unnaturally, has afforded a distinct experience of them. Not uncommonly, the loss is preceded by a particular quality of pain which is well presented by Tupper, who offers this tender account:
A raging throbbing tooth,—it burns, it burns!
Darting its fiery fibres to the brain,
A stalk of fever on a root of pain,
A red-hot coal, a dull sore cork by turns,
A poison, kindred to the viper’s fang,
Galling and fretting: ha! it stings again,
Riving the sensitive nerve with keenest pang [...](Tupper 1860/1992, 59)
Here, the quality is pointy, dull, pulsating, and persistent; throbbing, burning, and puncturing imagery dominate the entire stanza. In fact, a German saying considers the only pain worse than toothache as being in love but being unable to marry. Unmarried girls who complain of pain in their teeth are said to be teased cruelly about this: ‘[i]t is true that toothache is something horrible, but never mind, being without a husband is still worse than this’ (Kanner 1928, 102). Perhaps these two pangs can be read as metaphors for each other. Further, a rotten tooth has been compared with a rotten husband; both bringing equal pain. In Davners’ 1859 comic play, A Conjugal Lesson, a wife suffering with a violent and philandering husband curses her husband and her equally lamentable toothache:
It’s so unfeeling, when he knows this horrid toothache has been distracting me this two days. A bad toothache and a bad husband! I don’t know which is the greatest torment (in Steele 1859/2003, 179)
Image 2: Kanner 1929, 106
Over time, various monsters have been held responsible for tooth ache. Remarkably, these images of tooth ache monsters by far most often resemble serpents or worms. The extraordinary and tiny Tooth Worm has been held accountable for the tooth-related maladies for thousands of years. Kanner presents us with an image of Bitoso the Fasting, the ‘tooth ache demon’ of the Bosnian Gypsies (see image 2) who is one of nine demon-children of Anna the fairy queen and the dwarf King Locolica and ‘the least harmful [demon] of all’. (Kanner 1931, 517) Compare this with the locket crafted in the vastly different cultural climate of the South of France around 1780, presented on the frontispiece of an Illustrated History of Dentistry. (Ring 1985, 2, 28 – see image 3) Incidentally, the Tooth Worm depiction in image 3 is reminiscent of a medieval depiction of hell. B R Townsend, in 1944, noted that the earliest evidence he found of tooth worms occurs on a papyrus of the 20th dynasty of Egypt, circa 1,200-1,100 BC in which is described an official stationed at a desert out-post who complains of various diseases and laments that ‘the worm gnaweth at his teeth.’ (Townsend 1944, 37) Elsewhere, Ring indicates clay tablet in Babylonia offering the following story, effectively associating the tooth worm as being created equally by earthly and heavenly circumstances:
After Anu [had created heaven]…
The earth had created the rivers,
The rivers had created the canals,
The canals had created the marsh,
The marsh had created the worm.
The worm went weeping, before Shamash,
His tears flowing before Ea:
‘What wilt thou give me for my sucking?’
‘I shall give thee the ripe fig and the apricot.’
‘Of what use are they to me, the ripe fig and the apricot?
Lift me up and among the teeth
And the gums cause me to dwell!
The blood of the tooth will I suck,
And of the gum will I gnaw the roots!’
(Ring 1985, 28; see also a variation in Kanner 1931, 518)
Image 3: Ring 1985, 2
The native word for ‘toothache’ in Madagascar means ‘poorly through the worm’ (Townsend 1944, 42) and the Cherokee Indians declare the cause of toothache to be ‘a mere worm that has wrapped itself round the base of the tooth.’ (ibid, 43) Around the year 1700, the tooth worm theories began to lose scientific credibility when operators on the teeth such as Fauchard repeatedly failed to find worms in their researches and, even if they are occasionally found, Fauchard declared, they ‘can have little part in the causation of toothache or dental decay.’ (ibid, 45) However, as the locket of image 3 suggests, the imagery persisted.
Of course, the Gods have been more widely and generally held responsible for tooth ache or otherwise for affecting its cure. The Japanese, for instance, have a God, Agonashi-Jizo (literally, Jizo who has no jaw), who tore off his own jaw from his face and threw it away because of tooth ache. It is said that people pray to him hoping to rid themselves of their toothache. (Kanner 1931, 509) And, in Christianity, there is a patron saint of toothache and dentistry – Apollonia – and invocation of her name is supposed to bring immediate relief. (ibid, 512) There are prayers alluding to St. Peter’s toothache, which the Lord cured. Sometimes, St. Peter is replaced by other saints or the Virgin Mary. Kanner gives on Devonshire version of the charm:
All Glory! All glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was walking in the garden of Gethsemane, He saw Peter weeping. He called him unto Him, and said: ‘Lord, I am grievously tormented with pain, the pain of my tooth.’ Our Lord answered and said: ‘If thou wilt believe in Me, and My words abide with thee, thou shalt never feel any more pain in thy tooth.’ Peter said: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.’ God grant ease from pain in the teeth. (ibid, 511)
The importance of pain to the experience of teeth is also elucidated in Hood’s A True Story, which compliments Tupper’s account, though this time introducing a second character to interrupt the pain: the dentist. In the following two stanzas, one might identify two broad types of pain associated with the loss of teeth: physical, and emotional.
It had an universal sting;
One touch of that ecstatic stump
Could jerk his limbs, and make him jump
Just like a puppet on a string;
And what was worse than all, it had
A way of making others bad.
There is, as many know, a knack,
With certain farming undertakers,
And this same tooth pursued their track,
By adding achers still to achers!
When his old tooth began to break
The thread of old associations;
It touch’d a string in every part,
It had so many tender ties;
One chord [sic] seem’d wrenching at his heart,
And two were tugging at his eyes:
“Bone of his Bone” he felt of course,
As husbands do in such divorce
(Hood 1862-3/1992, 309-310, Hood’s emphasis)
Hood’s imagery provides a dreadfully vivid account of the teeth in pain; the quality of pain so palpable that one can almost feel the ‘ecstatic stump’ that causes the patient so much hassle; and the ability that pain has to infect adjacent teeth, adding ‘achers still to achers’. When the dentist begins his extraction in the second stanza, the quality of the pain develops into a more intricate and excruciating one: the tender ties break one-by-one as the tooth begins to crack and become dislodged, giving way to a different quality of pain – no longer aching, dull, or sensitive but instead a more piercing breaking of ‘tender ties’ and ‘old associations’. After a painful ordeal, the tooth is finally out, which presumably puts an end to the patient’s physical pain. The ‘tender ties’ and ‘old associations’ have dual meanings, however, and the patient’s pain does not stop at the tooth’s removal: the patient suffers a ‘divorce’. Indeed, ‘tender ties’ and ‘old associations’ denote an uneasy emotional upheaval. As this suggests, the teeth are part of a thinking, feeling human, and a furnished, sensing mouth. Teeth fall out and grow back (once). They are considered external to the body, yet pain from them marks a good proportion of one’s life. They are central to health, yet once beneath medical men who would, as Wendy Moore puts it, have no problem sticking an enema up someone’s backside but could never bring themselves to delve into someone’s stinking mouth (Moore 2005, 152). They are essential, yet extractable; they easily rot, yet are used as a last resort as the most durable items with which to identify a body; they are interior, yet exterior; at the margins of the body, they are disposable yet hold the mouth in shape. Taking the tongue as a focus of sensation, one might explore the landscape of one’s own mouth. One’s teeth are the mouth’s furniture and, just as if something changes about a familiar room, if something changes about one’s teeth, it is noticed. Any change to this landscape close to where, in European thought, one is (in the head) is in some sense unsettling. This is why having a tooth removed or a filling put in makes one’s mouth feel alien for a while until it becomes usual; until the wounds of the dental divorce heal. Perhaps this is also why any severity of pain in the mouth is distracting and why Shakespeare, in Much Ado About Nothing, knows of no philosopher who can abide tooth ache.
‘I pray thee peace, I will be flesh and bloud,
For there was neuer yet Philosopher,
That could endure the tooth-ake patiently,
How euer they haue writ the stile of gods,
And made a push at chance and sufferance.(Shakespeare 1623/1994, 117)
A tooth ache might be merely a constantly presence, just present enough to demand attention, and an alteration to how one perceives oneself. A pain in the mouth of any kind is distracting and a permanent unsettling.
Teeth have magical qualities, too, particularly for ‘country people’. In Forster’s Howard’s End, Ruth Wilcox, the soon-to-be-dead wife of Henry Wilcox and then owner of Howard’s end, begins to strike up a friendship with Margaret Schlegel, telling her about a wych-elm at the bottom of the garden:
‘The wych-elm I remember. Helen spoke of it as a very splendid tree.’
‘It is the finest wych-elm tree in Hertfordshire. Did your sister tell you about the teeth?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, it might interest you. There are pig’s teeth stuck into the trunk, about four feet from the ground. The country people put them in long ago, and they think that if they chew a piece of the bark it will cure the toothache. The teeth are almost grown over now, and no one comes to the tree.’
‘I should. I love folklore and all festering superstitions’
‘Do you think that the tree really did cure toothache, if one believed in it?’
‘Of course it did. It would cure anything – once.’
(Forster 1910/1973, 69)
Ultra-sensible and straight-laced Henry Wilcox, when Margaret asks him about the teeth declares it a ‘rum notion!’ (ibid 186) but he is surprised when he experiences them later (ibid 204). One particularly hellish quality of toothache in folklore is that it seems never able to be destroyed. Perhaps this is because the teeth are also made of extraordinarily hardy stuff. In any case, the persistence and quality of the pain is such that it only ever seems to be transferable. And methods, charms, spells, and chants abound that promise such a transfer or flushing away from and out of the body. The Tooth Worm must only be able to wriggle from one object to another – in the case in Forster’s novel, from the tooth to the tree. It is this hope of getting rid of the pain and the measures individuals will take that speaks of this aspect of their significance. In fact, such a transferral of pain from tooth to bark is a well-travelled folk remedy with versions all over the world. Carter and Carter report that ‘driving shed teeth into a tree to prevent toothache has been reported from North Carolina [...] and Illinois [...]’. (Carter and Carter 1990, 13) Also, in Bavaria, reports Leo Kanner, ‘the bark is carefully loosened in springtime from a young elder or willow on that side of the tree which is directed toward sunrise. A small splinter is cut out from the wood, with which the gums are poked until they bleed, and the splinter is refastened to the trunk and covered by the bark, which is tied or glued to the tree’ (Kanner 1928, 181). And in the ‘Province of Brandenburg’, a nail is used in place of a splinter and, as long as the tree with the nail in it exists, it will retain the pain of the tooth and the individual will be free from tooth ache (ibid, 184). A more elaborate remedy, again from Brandenburg, promises that if you are to be free from tooth ache, ‘[y]ou cut first the nails of the left foot, beginning from the little toe and proceeding to the big toe, then the nails of the right hand from the little finger toward the thumb; the same is done to the right foot and to the left hand in the same order. At each nail you say: “In the name of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” Then you ask somebody for a quill, put the twenty clippings into it, go to a tree, make a hole in the tree and put the clippings in this. The hole should be closed in the name of God, etc’ (ibid, 193). Kanner mentions tens of similar remedies involving trees and many more involving the transfer of pain involving animals and other objects. It is striking how so many tooth remedies feature a tree in them somewhere and usually as something into which pain is transferred. It is tempting to imagine the pain being dispersed into the rest of nature as a living force: a harbinger of the vital force John Hunter so strongly believed ran through every living thing, prompting his experiments in tooth transplantation – more of which later.
It is not exclusively trees to which pain gets transferred. A similar hope of relief is referred to in this piece by Egerton-Warburton, which refers to a belief that a tooth can ache independent of the body – in this case, the tooth aches in the basin:
‘”Why you should suffer so much pain
I cannot tell,” said little Jane,
A visitor embracing:
“Out from your mouth why don’t you take
Your teeth at once, and let them ache,
As Ma does,—in a basin?”(Egerton-Warburton 1877, 104)
This might be seen as stemming from homeopathic magic, whereby something can affect something else by virtue of being physically associated with it. It is perhaps this logic that allows rats, mice, and other animals with reputedly strong teeth to play their part in remedies. Incidentally, a few cures for toothache involve earth or other worms, which would appear to be based on sympathetic magic when one considers the prevalence of the tooth worm myth. (Townsend 1944, 46). Animals and teeth (and animal teeth) are closely related in folk lore and are favourite candidates from which to obtain dental strength or, conversely, from which to hide shed teeth to obviate undesirable qualities sprouting in the mouth in the future. For instance, it is said that teeth were burned in Europe, the USA, and by the North American Indians so that the tooth would not be swallowed by an animal, as, if swallowed, the soon-to-erupt tooth would look like the animal’s tooth ‘especially a dog’s tooth or a pig’s tooth’’ (Carter and Carter 1990, 1). In Utah, North Carolina, Illinois, and Texas, ‘southern Blacks buried their teeth under rocks to keep dogs from stepping on them, otherwise a dog’s tooth would grow in place of the lost tooth (ibid, 3). And in Saudi Arabia, ‘some children throw their shed teeth to the sun, saying “Take my donkey tooth [a large, ugly tooth] and give me the tooth a gazelle [a smaller tooth]”’ and, similarly, in Libya, Iraq, and Jordan there exist similar phrases: ‘Take the tooth of a cow and give me the tooth of a bride’ or ‘Sun, take this tooth of a donkey and give me the tooth of a gazelle’ (ibid, 11). When some African kings or chiefs die, their subjects crowd around their corpses and tear out their teeth and hair which is supposed allow the rain to fall, and when the king of a particular tribe in Angola dies, his teeth are extracted by an official, and presented to his successor, who then keeps it in a box with the teeth of the former kings. This is the property of the crown and, without which, no monarch can rule. (Kanner 1931, 514)
According to Carter and Carter, ‘[m]ice have been especially popular in European shed tooth rituals because of their strong, sharp teeth, and perhaps also because they symbolize growth and fertility’ (Carter and Carter 1990, 15). One example of these mouse rituals is this one from France in which a child offers its tooth to a mouse, saying the words:
‘Little mouse, here is my tooth, give me again a prettier tooth’ (ibid, 17)
In Armenia, it was believed that ancestral spirits occupied the specific mice that lived near a hearth. The teeth were therefore offered to those mice in particular (Ibid, 16). And many instances of similar charms involving mice – with very similar wordings, sometimes substituting categories of prettiness with those of strength – appear around the world. For American Indians the mouse is swapped for a similarly strong-toothed animal: the beaver (ibid, 20). Other traditions throw teeth to birds and hope they will bring them stronger ones. (ibid 16-17) Kanner provides elaborate and striking examples:
To be cured from toothache, bite off the head of a living mouse and suspend it from the neck, but beware of making a knot in the thread or in the ribbon upon which it is suspended. One always has good teeth after eating from the bread which was gnawed by a mouse, and particularly the very place which shows the notches from the animal’s teeth (Kanner 1928, 141)
In this case, the strength of the mouse’s teeth is said to imbue the teeth of the one who eats the bread or bites off the mouse’s head. In a later publication in Medical Life, Kanner recounts stories where ‘some of the personages dealt with in the bible’ are imbued with strong or hairy teeth: Jacob promised Judah teeth ‘whiter than milk’ and, according to Talmudic tradition, his teeth became so strong that he could crush iron plates into powder. Jacob’s brother, on the other hand, who has been characterised as a less savoury character, is said to have had teeth covered with hair.’ (Kanner 1931, 509-510) There thus appears to be two types of folk lore concerning teeth and animals. The first, as with the hiding of the tooth or somehow moving the tooth out of range of an animal with ugly teeth such as a dog; and the second, as with the hoping of a tooth like a gazelle or, by far more commonly, of the mice. In both of these instances, the quality of the tooth and its transference is important. Whether an individual wants to avoid becoming ugly or, in contrast, wants to have strong teeth free from tooth ache, the behaviour recognises a transfer of characteristics.
Although there are no recorded instances of the actual transplantation of animal teeth into the human body, as far as I am aware, it most probably did occur, and was in fact recommended by an ‘operator for the teeth’ Charles Allen, who insisted that transplanting teeth between two humans was ‘too Inhumane, and attended with too many Difficulties’ (Allen 1685, 11) but championed animal-human transplantation – at least as an idea. He recommended having a stock of ‘brutes’ such as dogs, sheep, goats and baboons (ibid, 11-12) and suggested choosing ‘an Animal whose Teeth should come nearest to those of the Patient [...] and having tied his legs together, [...] fasten his head in some convenient place, so that he might not stir in the least, and by some proper means keep his mouth open’ (ibid, 12). When drawing an animal’s tooth, the operator should leave ‘a very little portion of the Gums about it, and then having used the same circumspection, in dividing the Patient’s Tooth from the Gums, and the Jaw-bone [...] draw it forth, and put immediately in its place that of the Brute; fastening it very well and straight between the other Teeth’ (ibid). Here, the teeth of animals are proposed as substitutes for human teeth; merely functional replacement (it is doubtful that one would choose the tooth of a dog, sheep, goat, or baboon with which to beautify oneself with!)
Much of this thought about teeth and the experience of them persists. However, events of the 18th century shifted – or added to – this significance making it peculiar to this period (and sometimes lingering beyond). It is to this that I turn my attention in part 2… the film and another piece of writing that I’ll submit after the film!
I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this little piece and will look forward to seeing some of you soon!
All my best,
Paul.
List of Works Cited:
Allen, Charles (1685), The Operator for the Teeth, York: John White.
Carroll, Lewis (1866/2000), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with Forty-two Illustrations by John Tenniel, London: Macmillan and Co.
Carter, Joseph G, and Carter William J (1990), Of Mice and Tooth Fairies: Shed Tooth Customs from Around the World, North Carolina: Chapel Hill.
Egerton-Warburton, Rowland Eyles (1877), ‘Cure for Toothache’ from Poems, Epigrams and Sonnets, London: Basil Montagu Pickering, pp104.
Forster, Edward Morgan. (1910/1973), Howard’s End, London: Edward Arnold.
Hood, Thomas (1862-3/1992), ‘A True Story’ in The Works of Thomas Hood, Comic and Serious: in Prose and Verse, Edited with Notes by his Son, London: Edward Moxon & Co., 308-315
Kanner, Leo (1928), Folk Lore of the Teeth, New York: The Macmillan Company.
Kanner, Leo (1931), ‘The Teeth of Gods, Saints, and Kings: Hythologies and Historical Contributions to Dental Folklore’, in Medical Life, no. 38, 507 – 520
Moore, Wendy (2005), The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery, London: Bantam Press.
Ring, Malvin E (1985), Dentistry: An Illustrated History, New York: Harry N. Abrams, inc.
Shakespeare, William (1623/1994), ‘Much Adoe about Nothing’ in, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies, London: Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount.
Steele, Silas Sexton (1859/2003), A Conjugal Lesson: A Comic Play, in One Act and One Scene. By H. Danvers [in, Book of Plays for Home Amusement, being a Collection of Original, Altered and Selected Tragedies, Plays, Dramas, Comedies, Farces, Burlesques, Charades, Lectures, Etc., Carefully Arranged and Specially Adapted for Private Representation with Full Directions For Performance], Philadelphia: George G. Evan.
Townsend, B R (1944), ‘The Story of the Tooth-Worm’ in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 15, no.1 (January 1944), Maryland: the John Hopkins Press, pp37 – 58
Tupper, Martin Farquhar (1860/1992), ‘Toothache’ in Three Hundred Sonnets, London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, and Co., 59.
Paul William Craddock