The skin of my yellow country teeth.

"Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth and spotted the dangers beneath. All the toffees I chewed and the sweet sticky food. Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth." - Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth - Pam Ayres.

Not only did I make it into the Wellcome Collection's Teeth exhibition by the skin of my teeth (well, three days before it closed) but I also happened to be there at two-thirty in the afternoon to find the doors 'open wide'. The toothypeg related coincidences, ones I'd imagined to be as rare as hen's teeth, were piling up like plaque on my incisors after a weekend camping like a pirate in Swanage (more later). Hell's teeth!

 Honore Daumier - "Let's see....... Open your mouth!" (1864)

The exhibition was free and not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth (I'll run out of tooth related sayings and idioms soon, I'm sure) I hopped on the 63 bus and walked along Euston Road on a pleasantly warm September afternoon to find out what this dentistry business is all about.

As a child I was absolutely petrified of even the most basic dental treatment but after a bicycle crash that not only resulted in sixteen stitches in my chin and another six in my upper lip I underwent so much dental treatment that it totally inured me to it and left me completely unafraid of the surgical mask, the spittoon, and even the drill. Even one of my dentists serving time for murder (murdering another dentist, no less) didn't put me off. Though the exorbitant charges these molar molesters now demand means I don't go as often as I should.

Oral hygiene motto (c.1910)

Despite spending way too much time, and money, at the dentist I'd never given an inordinate amount of thought to either dentistry or teeth in general. When they ache they really fucking ache and you can't stop thinking about them but not in any kind of historical way.

They're odd things. They're very useful for breaking up food and stuff and, somehow, they don't even get in the way when you're kissing but there's something very raw, very exposed about teeth. They are, as the introduction to the exhibition points out, 'the only exposed part of the human skeleton during life' and they're also used to identify particularly mangled bodies after death so perhaps they in some way remind of us our mortality. Perhaps that's why they turn up in so many sayings and so often in dreams.

Oral hygiene motto (c.1910)

Patient toothbrushes, Hudson River State Hospital, Poughkeepsie, New York (2005)

At least now dentistry is performed by experts - and with anaesthetic. That's not always been the case during the three hundred years that the Wellcome Collection's show covers and there are plenty of examples on display in this impressively comprehensive, and free, history of how we look after, or not, our gnashers!

There are human remains that we're instructed not to take photographs of, there's a Goya painting of a tooth hunter, there's a toothpick cast into the shape of an erect penis, a ninety second video of former Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan (a man who was once described as having "a mouth like a burned-out castle") having new teeth fitted and celebrating with a bite of an apple, and there's a Jane Jackson book of recipes intended to destroy worms in teeth, make teeth grow, make teeth whiter, cure toothache, and even to make them break and fall out. Written in 1642 its title is the rather wonderful, and somewhat long winded, 'A very shorte and compendious Methode of Phisicke and Chirurgery Containeinge the Cures inwardly and also the Cureinge of all manner of woundes on the bodie".

There are amulets designed to protect against toothache (mole's feet, bizarrely, were deemed to be a cure - a theory dating back to Pliny the Elder, AD23-79), there are votives offered, probably, to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, and there's an oak rendering of Saint Apollonia, the Christian martyr from Alexandria whose persecution involved the shattering and pulling out of her teeth and eventually died by leaping voluntarily into the fire in which the Roman authorities were threatening to burn her for refusing to renounce her faith. She is know popularly regarded as the patroness of dentistry.

Saint Apollonia and her Tormentors (1850-1928)

Humans have fretted about their teeth going back much further than the Roman times of Pliny the Elder and Saint Apollonia though. A newborn baby makes its first connections with the world via its lips, gums, and teeth and the fact that we speak of biting our nails, grinding out teeth, and having our teeth on edge demonstrates just how central they are to our existence.

But for thousands of years people relied on herbal remedies, prayers, or, by the eighteenth century, professional teeth pullers. Often itinerant these people were more circus acts than medics and they seemed to be rewarded more for their ability to create a spectacle than to absolve pain. French physician Pierre Fauchard started out pulling teeth at fairgrounds before realising there was more money to be had by positioning himself within the self-conscious, and vain, Parisian elite.

In 1782 he published Le Chirugien-Dentiste, his manifesto for the brand new profession of 'dentiste' made bold claims that he could make teeth not only look better but work better. But only if you were rich. As wealthy patrons had expensively crafted dentures fitted the majority of folk still had to rely on bloody extractions by teeth pullers, barber-surgeons, or even blacksmiths!

Le Grand Thomas, La Perle de Charlatans, AKA the Terror of the Human Jaw plied his trade as a teeth puller on the Pont Neuf in Paris where he was widely regarded as the most flamboyant of tooth-pullers. His party trick was using his not inconsiderable strength to lift his client off the ground to allow their own weight to perform the extraction.

Fauchard and Le Grand Thomas were now on very different paths. As Le Grand Thomas wooed the crowds on the banks of the Seine, Fauchard was inventing methods for repairing, straightening, and cleaning teeth. Rather than just extracting them, Fauchard sought to fix them, to beautify them.

It wasn't easy going. Early dentures, often fashioned from hippopotamus or walrus ivory, were tricky to keep in place and prone to becoming foul with comestibles and saliva. They'd generally last about three years before they needed replacing. The teeth of dead humans proved more durable and soon they were sourced from anatomy schools,  hospitals, graves, and even battlefields. It's said that every good tooth was stripped from each dead soldier's mouth after 1815's Battle of Waterloo within twenty-four hours!

Some dentists didn't even wait for people to die before they ripped their teeth out. Thomas Rowlandson's 1790 Transplanting of Teeth shows a chimney sweep undergoing a painful looking extraction while wealthy Georgian clothes horses wait to receive them. When the French dentist Jean-Pierre La Mayeur moved his practice to New York in 1781 he placed a newspaper ad that read "any person disposed to part with their FRONT TEETH may received Two guineas for each Tooth on application".

Thomas Rowlandson - Transplanting of Teeth (1790)

Hendrik van der Burgh - Interior of a Dutch House with an Operator Attending to a Man's Teeth (c.1638-66)

Extractions could be understandably painful when the only anaesthetics available were alcohol or some herbal concoction. In Hendrik van der Burgh's 17c oil painting the patient is in such agony he's kicked over a basket of eggs and startled a dog.

Most of the medical profession viewed tooth pulling with disdain and left the dirty deed to barbers, who as well as cutting hair and pulling teeth would amputate limbs when required. The only positive part, at least in the nineteenth century, was getting to sit in one of these impressive oak barber-surgeon chairs. This example could be seen as a precursor to the modern dental chair but it also resembles some kind of medieval torture device. In truth it was pretty much a combination of both.

Barber-surgeon chair (19th century)

From the days of Elizabeth I, sugar had been a luxury item but a luxury item that was blackening the teeth of those who could afford it. A German visitor to Elizabeth's court reported that her lips were narrow and her teeth were black. Napoleon, whose silver gilt handled toothbrush was on display at the Wellcome Collection, was also said to have such "bad and dirty" teeth he rarely showed them and George Washington, too, remained tight-lipped in public, and on today's dollar bill, leading many to speculate he had no teeth at all. Current thinking is that he was working hard to hold down the spring keeping his dentures in place.

To anybody fearful of the dentist's drill now it'll seem odd to consider that its arrival, and that of X-rays, pharmaceutical drugs, and even modern toothpaste (as far back as 5000BC the Egyptians had been using a 'tooth powder' made of ox hooves, myrrh, and burnt eggshells), made a visit to the dentist a more, rather than less, pleasurable experience. So much so that people started going to the dentist even when they didn't have toothache. Check-ups.

The advent of the drill meant that teeth could be filled rather than extracted but the dentist needed to be fit because early clockwork drills, like James B Morrison's below, were soon replaced by foot operated ones that could spin at 2,000rpm providing the dentist could pump the pedal hard enough. It was said you could spot a dentist by his muscular right thigh.

Treadle drill

Diamond 2 dental chair

Dentists could pay home visits with portable drills but if you wanted to sit in one of their fancy new hydraulic chairs you'd have to go see them at their surgery. You'd get to take advantage of 'plush upholstery' and 'streamlined anatomical shaping'. What more could a patient ask for?  

What about an X-ray unit so the dentist could actually have a look inside your mouth without nearly breaking your jaw? That'd definitely be useful and the fact that it's still an integral part of most dental visits suggests most of us accepted it to be so. The 'phantom head' from the University of Utrecht may look like something from the dim, distant, and dangerous past but it, too, is still used to the present day. We don't see anything like it when we visit the dentist but trainee dentists will practise on one, usually with real human teeth inserted into it. If you think that's grisly a former acquaintance of mine once told me that his sister and her future husband first met at dental training school sawing a dead man's head off.

Oralix mobile X-ray unit

Phantom head (c.1890)

The slightly less grisly end of dental care is the business of toothbrushes and toothpaste. Imprisoned in 1770 for inciting a riot in Spitalfields, William Addis used his time in Newgate to pioneer the first modern toothbrush. On his release a decade later he established a successful business selling his new inventions, which used animal bone for their handles and hog hair for their brushes. Or badger hair if you really fancied splashing out.

Moving away from ox hooves and myrrh, early modern toothpaste would still use some fairly unusual sounding ingredients. If soap, salt, and even charcoal sound reasonable enough would you really wish to intentionally put brick dust in your mouth? Squeezable tubes first appeared in the 1940s and fluoride based pastes ten years later. Early toothpaste companies promoted their wares not just as dental protection but as breath sweeteners and mouth beautifiers. The vanity of man is such that often he cares more about what he looks like on the outside that what he does to his insides.

Framed dentist's window display (Late 19th century)

Temper Malins painless extraction advertisement (Early 20th century)

If having a mouth full of brick dust, soap, and charcoal wasn't enough you could always try a little cocaine. Temper Malins were one of many companies who saw, in the advent of anaesthetics (cocaine being a popular choice), an opportunity. Instead of fixing these endlessly bothersome teeth why not have the whole lot ripped out, professionally, painlessly, and not by some kind of circus strongman, and replaced with comparatively affordable vulcanite dentures. It'd save you a fortune in the long run. You'd never need to visit the dentist again. 

The cocaine would be injected into your mouth via the oft feared hypodermic syringe (first the syringe, then the drill, dental tools really aren't pleasant are they?) to deliver a local anaesthetic which meant you could be awake and able to witness the whole process and then spill drinks down your top for about twelve hours afterwards because your mouth is so numb you can't locate where it starts or ends. Soon alternatives like lignocaine, often supplemented with adrenaline, replaced cocaine as the mouth number of choice.

Binaca toothpaste advertisement (1944-45)

Some aspects of the toothpaste industry were far more innocent and steered away from the introduction of Class A drugs. Niklaus Stoecklin who conjured up this cheeky squirrel for the Swiss toothpaste firm Binaca went on to become a professor at Basel's influential Design School and Michael English, who'd worked with the graphic artist Nigel Waymouth as part of the duo Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, incorporated the pop art stylings of Gibbs toothpaste, along with Coca-Cola bottle tops, in his seventies poster series 'English Rubbish'. It was intended as art rather than advertising but it got English a gig in the commercial world.

Michael English - Gibbs toothpaste poster print (c.1970)

Pop-art, bushy tailed critters, these developments were intended to show that dentists, and dental care in general, was friendly and not to be feared. It was the partial culmination (we're still not totally there) of a long journey to encourage people to take a preventative approach to oral hygiene. At the outbreak of World War I many signing up for the British Army were rejected precisely because of their bad teeth. 

Campaigns were launched announcing that both your dentist and your toothbrush were your friends. But it was another launch, that of the NHS in 1948, that made the most positive impact on dental care. Take-up far outstripped expectation placing a burden on the NHS that the Tories are still loathe to fund to this day. In the first nine months of the NHS its dentists would provide 33,000,000 artificial dentures, a figure that would double within just three years and result in the introduction of charges. I'd always wondered why it was free to to have work done at the hospital but not at the dentist. I wonder no more.

Dental Board of the United Kingdom - Our Friend the Dentist (1926)

Sophie le Giraffe (1961)

Although it was a nuisance, and a considerable inconvenience, to have to pay for the dental treatment it was definitely preferable to dying. The high infant mortality rates that persisted into the nineteenth century were often blamed on teething problems and kids were sometimes given red coral to gnaw on. These were soon replaced with 'softer' options like Sophie le Giraffe. Sophie began her life in France in 1961 and is now a global phenomenon. There are over 50,000,000 little Sophies out there being dribbled on and bitten now.

Elsewhere campaigns were launched to encourage the rinsing of one's mouth after eating or ending meals with a juicy red apple. To the effect that nowadays it's estimated that only one ton of children's teeth are extracted in the UK each year rather than the lorry load suggested in the eye catching poster from the 1960s below.

Gibbs Oral Hygiene Service - Swish and swallow (c.1960)

4 tons of children's teeth (1960s)

D and W Gibbs Ltd - Your Teeth are Ivory Castles board game (c.1920s)

In fact, as if to attempt to quell children's quite natural fear of having their mouth drilled and syringes injected into their gums, both dentistry and tooth loss were sold as fun experiences. Gibbs issued the Your Teeth are Ivory Castles board game as early as the 1920s (a version of Snakes and Ladders in which Fairies and Archers help you on your way to the Gibbs Dentrifice Castle of Health and Happiness while Imps and Giant Decay try to lead you astray) and the Tooth Fairy dates back, probably, there are many competing accounts of the fairy's history, even further.

We all know the protocol. A tooth falls out. We put it under the pillow and the next morning there's a shiny sixpence, a silvery ten pence coin, or some other recompense in its place depending on the era you grew up in. In my day we never felt the need to write a letter to the tooth fairy and the idea that if we did there'd be a reply would probably have been laughed at but it would appear, going by the evidence below, that that is no longer the case.

Letter to the Tooth Fairy

Letter from the Tooth Fairy

Claudius Ash and Sons - Junior dental unit with chair (c.1950)

Such was the emphasis on childhood dental care that junior dental units, like the fine specimen above by Claudius Ash and Sons, looked more futuristic than those designed for adult patients. Recognising that whether you're trying to cultivate a Hollywood smile (English teeth being considered of such poor quality in 1964 that Spike Milligan recited a poem about their "brown grey and black appearance" before releasing a boxful of wind-up chatterers to chase him across the stage of the London Palladium) or just maintain the functionality of your teeth to the degree that you can consume food adequately you need to start young.

It's possible you may judge a person by the state of their teeth. Too careworn? That person doesn't look after themselves. Too shiny? That person's vain. Fangs? That dude's a vampire. It's difficult to get the balance between Christopher Lee's Dracula and Shirley Temple in Now and Forever right.

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave lobby card (1961)

Now and Forever lobby card (1934)

De Trey & Co Ltd, London - Spittoon (Early 20th century)

However much care you take over your teeth, and it's totally your decision, it goes without saying that they at least need brushing from time to time. As mentioned earlier I went camping in Swanage once, it got very boozy, and I didn't brush my teeth for three days. I was accused of going 'pirate' but I just felt dirty. It's not a mistake I've made again and after visiting this fantastic and informative exhibition it's one I don't intend to. With that I rinsed out into the nearest spittoon and then considered the Wellcome Collection's dazzling display of tooth rotting cakes with a somewhat ambivalent mindset.

"How I laughed at my mother’s false teeth as they foamed in the waters beneath. But now comes the reckonin’ it’s me they are beckonin’. Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth."