Dear Friends,
This post is to constitute my 500 word submission for the LitSciMed Event 2. So, what have we got here?!
It’s a 19th Century Japanese sign announcing a doctor’s surgery. I have been interested in the poetics of the object, here, rather than any ‘real’ history. In other words, I have looked at the object only and associated it with other elements of Japanese culture that I know about. Originally, I was going to look at the lock of King George III’s hair encased upstairs in the Wellcome Collection’s Medicine Man gallery but lots of what I wanted to write about was pre-empted when Simon Chaplin produced a lock of William Hunter’s hair for our group discussion. So, I went for the above instead. I wanted to look at the use of teeth in particular and speculate upon potential meanings the teeth might have. I suppose my approach is taken from merely looking at the object – any ‘real’ history of it would probably expose my thinking as entirely untrue. However, I think that practising some of this ‘free association’ can yield interesting results. That they were, in this instance, meant to signify something to do with health and healing prompted me into thinking about the position of teeth in Japanese traditions.
I was thinking about the status of and the experience of them. They 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 have no problem sticking an enema up someone’s backside but could never bring themselves to delve into a stinking mouth. 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 your body, they are disposable yet hold your mouth in shape. Taking one’s tongue as a focus of sensation, one might explore the landscape of the mouth with it. The 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 you are said to be (that being in the head according to ‘Western’ thought) 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.
I think that little bit of phenomenology is common no matter what your nationality, though I suppose teeth do indeed mean things to different people of different (or even the same) groups. To this end, and considering the teeth as perhaps considered excrement of the body or in some other sense external, I wanted to bring to bear the Japanese concept of Kuyō, which has been described as is a Buddhist term referring to a ritual practice that is ‘at once a worship service, a formal apology and an expression of gratitude, an appeasement rite, and a funeral. [...]’ (Law 1997, 201-202). For an inanimate object, that is. La Fleur quotes from Wagatsuma:
The women pray that these needles may now enter into a deserved Buddhahood. There in the temple or shrine they pass these through a block of bean-curd (tofu, an eminently soft substance). In effect they say: ‘You needles have spent your lives doing hard work. You unstintingly gave of yourself by again and again going through tough pieces of cotton cloth – even suffering in such labors [sic]. Now lie down on this mattress of bean-curd and take your rest.’ (quoted from Wagatsuma in La Fleur 1992, 144-145)
If the teeth can be considered as an inanimate object – or pseudo-inanimate object – then I think there might be some nice play between this particular concept of mortality being extended in that the many teeth dangling from the doctor’s sign may be said to have been laid to rest in a similar way to the needle in the quotation above. Perhaps the teeth could then be interpreted as being remnants of others’ bodies the doctor has treated…
I suppose, if I were to conclude this little entry, I would say that I would need to look much deeper into Japanese medical traditions and this kind of signage in particular in order to draw any useful historical points. However, as a poetic exercise (I suppose you could call it), and a means through which one might think about teeth, it is a fascinating object.
Paul William Craddock