Open wide!(The Straggler)(dentists)(Column)

MY daughter needs braces, I am due for a check-up, and my wife has lost a crown. (Singing Bishop Heber's fine hymn, "Holy, Holy, Holy," I have often reflected on the pleasure dentists must feel at the line, "Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.") With all these dental events coming at me simultaneously, my head is, as it were, full of teeth.

I am happy for my girl, at least. One of the undoubted advances civilization has made these past 30 years has been in the widespread availability of orthodontic treatment. My younger colleagues--even the English ones!--all have splendid dentition. Though glad for them, I am a little envious, as my own teeth are in a sorry state. A child of the postwar provincial English working class, I never even heard of orthodontistry until it was far too late, and was raised with dental role models like the late Queen Mother, who always appeared in newspaper photographs smiling, but really should have known better.

At least I still have my own teeth, or most of them. In my parents' generation it was a common thing to have no teeth at all by age 30. My father had none for as far back as I remember. "Teeth are just a nuisance," I remember adults saying. "You're better off without them." Dentally speaking, history is a catalog of horrors.

There are a few exceptions: Sir Isaac Newton died at age 84 with all his teeth intact. For most of humanity, though, teeth were either rotten or altogether absent. Nor was dental caries any respecter of rank: Elizabeth I had teeth that were decayed down to black stumps by middle age, as a result of her addiction to sweet raisins. Lower down the social scale things were surely worse. Shakespeare gives us a clue: " ... The rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it: and for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air" (Julius Caesar, I.ii).

Indeed, once you get into the literary record, it is hard to avoid the impression that the heaviest cross mankind had to bear before the invention of fluoridated toothpaste and dental floss was not so much toothache as halitosis. This long, smelly era of human history continued until at least 1937, when George Orwell's travels among the northern English proletariat drove him to the following exasperated apothegm: "You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks." (Oddly, though William Ian Miller's book The Anatomy of Disgust gives over a whole chapter to Orwell and his acute sense of smell, this remark is not included. Miller has, in fact, almost nothing to say about halitosis at all, with no index entries between "hair" and "hatred." Perhaps some things are too ...