When Teeth Were Teeth

On this frigid February day, I'm deep in the middle of my manuscript for the fourth Baroque Mystery. Tito and company are rehearsing an opera at an out-of-the-way villa in the hills of the Veneto. It's autumn--the trees are flaming scarlet and gold and the fields are bathed in that uniquely warming autumn sunlight. Maybe it's the disconnect between my freezing toes and the words I'm typing, but the page just isn't filling up and I need a break!

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I've been meaning to share some 18th-century curios and oddites I've stumbled across in my research. Here's the first installment.

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In elementary school, most of us heard about George Washington's wooden false teeth and why his likeness on the dollar bill makes him look like he has a powerful toothache. Maybe he was just worrying over where his teeth actually came from. He had several sets of dentures, and at least one of them was made of hippotamus ivory, but none were wooden. As I researched the matter for a Baroque Mystery character that will have artificial teeth, I was surprised to find that many dentures were fashioned of real teeth. Some were harvested from cadavers by grave robbers or unscrupulous sextons. Some came from executed criminals. And in wartime, many were pulled from the mouths of soldiers as they lay dead or dying on the battlefield. Several decades after Washington's (and Tito's) time, these came to be know as "Waterloo teeth."

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The real shocker for me was how many desperately poor young people traded a lifetime of eating gruel for just a few coins. The "donors" had to be young, as the primitive oral care of the day led to rot and disease at an early age. Their teeth were loosened with careful hammering--don't want to damage those valuable chompers!--then removed with pliers. It just goes to show how little things change. Then it was teeth, now its third-world citizens selling their kidneys to be transplanted into Americans and Europeans. Unfortunately, there will always be opportunists willing to turn a profit from the misery of others.