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!