Cobb's Anatomy

In the main, though, we are born without teeth. We are born without a number of things—clothes for example—although Anthony Comstock is said to be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on; but teeth is the subject which we are now discussing. This absence of teeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in the face of an old fashioned buckskin purse with the draw string broken, but be that as it may, we are generally fairly well content with life until the teeth begin to come.

First there are the milk teeth. Right there our troubles start. To use the term commonly in use, we cut them, although as a matter of fact, they cut us—cut them with the aid of some such mussy thing as a toothing ring or the horny part of the nurse's thumb, or the reverse side of a spoon—cut them at the cost of infinite suffering, not only for ourselves but for everybody else in the vicinity. And about the time we get the last one in we begin to lose the first one out. They go one at a time, by falling out, or by being yanked out, or by coming out of their own accord when we eat molasses taffy. They were merely what you might call our Entered Apprentice teeth. We go in now for the full thirty-two degrees—one degree for each tooth and thirty-two teeth to a set. By arduous and painful processes, stretching over a period of years, we get our regular teeth—the others were only volunteers—concluding with the wisdom teeth, as so called, but it is a misnomer, because there never is room for them and they have to stand up in the back row and they usually arrive with holes in them, and if we really possessed any wisdom we would figure out some way of abolishing them altogether. They come late and crowd their way in and push the other teeth out of line and so we go about for months with the top of our mouths filled with braces and wires and things, so that when we breathe hard we sob and croon inside of ourselves like an Aeolean harp.

But in any event we get them all and no sooner do we get them than we begin to lose them. They develop cavities and aches and extra roots and we spend a good part of our lives and most of our substance with the dentist. Nevertheless, in spite of all we can do and all he can do, we keep on losing them. And after awhile, they are all gone and our face folds up on us like a crush hat or a concertina and from our brow to our chin we don't look much more than a third as long as we used to look. We dislike this folded-up appearance naturally—who wouldn't? And we get tired of living on spoon victuals and the memory of past beef-steaks. So we go and get some false ones made. They have to be made to order; there appears to be no market for custom made teeth; you never see any hand-me-down teeth advertised, guaranteed to fit any face and withstand a damp climate. Getting them made to order is a long and unhappy process and I will pass over it briefly. Having got them, we find that they do not fit us or that we do not fit them, which comes to the same thing. The dentist makes them fit by altering us some and the teeth some, and after some months they quit feeling as though they didn't belong to us but had been borrowed temporarily from somebody's loan collection of ceramics.

But just about the time they are becoming acclimated and we are getting used to them, the interior of our mouth for private reasons best known to itself changes around materially and we either have to go back and start all over and go through the whole thing again, or else haply we die and pass on to the bourne from which no traveller returneth either with his teeth or without them. If Shakespeare had only thought of it—and he did think of a number of things from time to time—he might have divided his Seven Ages of Man much better by making them the Seven Ages of Teeth as follows: First age—no tooth; second age—milk teeth; third age—losing 'em; fourth age—getting more teeth; fifth age—losing 'em; sixth age—getting false teeth and finding they aren't satisfactory; seventh age—toothless again.

I knew a man once who was a gunsmith and lost all his teeth at a comparatively early age. He went along that way for years. He had to eschew the tenderloin for the reason that he couldn't chew it, and he had to cut out hickory nut cake and corn on the ear and such things. But there is nothing about the art of gunsmithing which seems to call for teeth, so he got along very well, living in a little house with the wife of his bosom and a faithful housedog named Ponto. But when he was past sixty he went and got himself some teeth from the dentist. He did this without saying anything about it at home; he was treasuring it up for a surprise. The corner stone was laid in May and the scaffolding was all up by July and in August the new teeth were dedicated with suitable ceremonies.

They altered his appearance materially. His nose and chin which had been on terms of intimacy now rubbed each other a last fond good-bye and his face lost that accordion-pleated look and straightened out and became about six or seven inches longer from top to bottom. He now had a sort of determined aspect like the iron jawed lady in a circus, whereas before his face had the appearance of being folded over and wadded down inside of his neck band, so his hat could rest comfortably on his collar. He knew he was altered, but he didn't realize how much he was altered until he went home that evening and walked proudly in the front gate. His wife who was timid about strangers, slammed the door right in his face and faithful Ponto came out from under the porch steps and bit him severely in the calf of the leg. There was only one consolation in it for him—for the first time in a long number of years he was in position to bite back.

And that's how it is with teeth—with your teeth let us say—for right here I'm going to drop the personal pronoun and speak of them as your teeth from now on. If anybody has to suffer it might as well be you and not me; I expect to be busy telling about it. As I started to say awhile ago, you—remember it's you from this point—you get your regular teeth and they start right in giving you trouble. Every little while one of them bursts from its cell with a horrible yell and in the lulls between pangs you go forth among men with the haunted look in your eye of one who is listening for the footfalls of a dread apparition, and one half of your head is puffed out of plumb as though you were engaged in the whimsical idea of holding an egg plant in the side of your jaw. A kind friend meets you, and, speaking with that high courage and that lofty spirit of sacrifice which a kind friend always exhibits when it's your tooth that is kicking up the rumpus and not his, he tells you you ought to have something done for it right away. You know that as well as he does, but you hate to have the subject brought up. It's your toothache anyhow. It originated with you. You are its proud parent but not so awfully proud at that. Mother and child doing as well as could be expected, but not expected to do very well.

But these friends of yours keep on shoving their free advice on you and the tooth keeps on getting worse and worse until the pain spreads all through the First Ward and finally you grab your resolution in both hands to keep it from leaking out between your fingers and you go to the dentist's.

This happens so many times that after awhile you lose count and so would the dentist, if he didn't write your name down every time in his little red book with pleasingly large amounts entered opposite to it. It seems to you that you are always doing something for your teeth? You have them pulled and pushed and shoved and filled and unfilled and refilled and excavated and blasted and sculptured and scroll-sawed and a lot of other things that you wouldn't think could be done legally without a building permit. As time passes on, the inside of your once well-tilled and commodious head becomes but little more than a recent site. Your vaults have been blown and most of your contents abstracted by Amalgam Mike and Dental Slim, the Demon Yeggmen of the Human Face. You are merely the scattered clews left behind for the authorities to work on; you are the faint traces of the fiendish crime. You are the point marked X.

But all along there is generally one tooth that has behaved herself like a lady. Other teeth may have betrayed your confidence but Old Faithful has hung on, attending to business, asking only for standing room and kind treatment. The others you may view with alarm, but to this tooth you can point with pride. But have a care—she is deceiving you.

Some night you go to bed and have a dream. In your dream it seems to you that a fox terrier is chasing a woodchuck around and around the inside of your head. In that tangled sort of fashion peculiar to dreams your sympathy seems to go out first to the fox terrier and then to the woodchuck as they circle about nimbly, leaping from your tonsils to your larynx and then up over the rafters in the roof of your mouth and down again and pattering over the sub-maxillary from side to side. But about then you wake up with a violent start and decide that any sympathy you may have in stock should be reserved for personal use exclusively, because at this moment the dog trees the woodchuck at the base of that cherished tooth of yours and starts to dig him out. He is a very determined dog and very active, but he needs a manicure. You are struck by that fact almost immediately.

Uttering some of those trite and commonplace remarks that are customary for use under such circumstances and yet are so futile to express one's real sentiments, you arise and undertake to pacify the infuriated creature with household remedies. You try to lure him away with a wad of medicated cotton stuck on the end of a parlor match. But arnica is evidently an acquired taste with him. He doesn't seem to care for it any more than you do. You begin to dress, using one hand to put your clothes on with and the other to hold the top of your head on. At this important juncture, the dog tears down the last remaining partitions and nails the woodchuck. The woodchuck is game—say what you will about the habits and customs of the woodchuck you have to hand it to him there—he's game as a lion. He fights back desperately. Intense excitement reigns throughout the vicinity. While the struggle wages you get your clothes on and wait for daylight to come, which it does in from eight to ten weeks. Norway is not the only place where the nights are six months long.

There is nobody waiting at the dentist's when you get there, it being early. You are willing to wait. At a barber shop it may be different but at a dentist's you are always willing to wait, like a gentleman. But the sinewy young man who is sitting in the front parlor reading the Hammer Thrower's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air of gaiety entirely out of keeping with the circumstances and invites you to step right in. He tells you that you are next. This is wrong—if you were next you would turn and flee like a deer. Not being next, you enter. Right from the start you seem to take a dislike to this young man. You catch him spitting in his hands and hitching his sleeves up as you are hanging up your hat. Besides he is too robust for a dentist. With those shoulders he ought to be a boiler maker or a safe mover or something of that sort. You resolve inwardly that next time you go to a dentist you are going to one of a more lady-like bearing and gentler demeanor. It seems a brutal thing that a big strong man should waste his years in a dental establishment when the world is clamoring for strong men to do the heavy lifting jobs. But before you can say anything, this muscular athlete has laid violent hands on your palpitating form and wadded it abruptly into the hideous embraces of a red plush chair, which looks something like the one they use up at Sing Sing, only it's done more quickly up there and with less suffering on the part of the condemned. On one side of you you behold quite a display of open plumbing and on the other side a tasty exhibit of small steel tools of assorted sizes. No matter which way your gaze may stray you'll be seeing something attractive.

You also take notice of an electric motor about large enough, you would say, to run a trolley car, which is purring nearby in a sinister and forbidding way. They are constantly making these little improvements in the dental profession. I have heard that fifty years ago a dentist traveled about over the country from place to place, sometimes pulling a tooth and sometimes breaking a colt. He practiced his art with an outfit consisting of two pairs of iron forceps—one pair being saber-toothed while the other pair was merely saw-fretted—and he gave a man the same kind of treatment he gave a horse, only he tied the horse's legs first. But now electricity is in general use and no dentist's establishment is complete without a dynamo attachment which makes a crooning sound when in operation and provides instrumental accompaniment to the song of the official canary.

I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play on the guitar and I know why a man with an emotional Adam's apple always wears an open front collar. I know these things, but am debarred from telling them by reason of a solemn oath. But I have not yet been able to discover why every dentist keeps a canary in his office. Nor do I know why it is, just as you settle your neck back on a head rest that's every bit as comfortable as an anvil, and just as a dentist climbs into you as far as the arm pits and begins probing at the bottom of a tooth which has roots extending back behind your ears, like an old-fashioned pair of spectacles, that the canary bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle bone and dash into a melodious outburst of two hundred thousand twitters, all of them being twitters of the same size, shape, and color. For that matter, I don't even know what kind of an animal a cuttle is, although I should say from the shape of his bone as used by the canary instead of a pocket handkerchief, that he is circular and flat and stands on edge only with the utmost difficulty. If you will pardon my temporary digressions into the realm of natural history, we will now return to the main subject, which was your tooth.

The moment the muscular young man starts up his motor and gives the canary its music cue and begins pawing over his tool collection to pick out a good sharp one, you recover. All of a sudden you feel fine, and so does the tooth. Neither one of you ever felt better. The fox terrier must have killed the woodchuck and then committed suicide. You are about to mention this double tragedy and beg the young man's pardon for causing him any trouble and excuse yourself and go away, but just then he quits feeling of his biceps and suddenly seizes you by your features and undoes them. If you are where you can catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror you will immediately note how much the human face divine can be made to look like an old-fashioned red brick Colonial fire place.

There are likely to be several things you would like to talk about. You are full of thoughts seeking utterance. For one thing you want to tell him you don't think the brand of soap he uses on his hands is going to agree with you at all. You probably don't care personally for the way your barber's thumb tastes either, but a barber's thumb is Peaches Melba alongside of a dentist's. Before you can say anything though he discovers a cavity or orifice of some sort in the base of your tooth. It seems to give him pleasure. Filled with intense gratification by this discovery and fired moreover by the impetuous ardor of the chase, he grabs up a crochet needle with a red hot stinger on the end of it and jabs it down your tooth to a point about opposite where your suspenders fork in the back.

You have words with him then, or at least you start to have words with him, but he puts his knee in your chest and tells you that it really doesn't hurt at all, but is only your imagination, and utters other soothing remarks of that general nature. He then exchanges the crochet needle for a kind of an instrument with a burr on the end of it. This instrument first came into use at the time of the Spanish Inquisition but has since been greatly improved on and brought right up to date. He takes this handy little utensil and proceeds to stir up your imagination some more. You again try to say something, speaking in a muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a brother assassin in the adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a prime old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests his tools against the palate of his victim and comes in.

As nearly as you can gather from hearsay evidence, you not being an eye witness yourself, one of them harpoons the nerve just back of the gills with a nutpick—remember please it is your nerve that they are taking all these liberties with—and pulls it out of its retreat and the other man takes a tack hammer and tries to beat its brains out. Any time he misses the nerve he hits you, so his average is still a thousand, and it is fine practice for him. A pleasant time is had by everybody present except you and the nerve. The nerve wraps its hind legs around your breastbone and hangs on desperately. You perspire freely and make noises like a drunken Zulu trying to sing a Swedish folk song while holding a spoonful of hot mush in his mouth.

In time becoming wearied even of these congenial diversions and tiring of the shop talk that has been going on, the second dentist returns to his original prey and the party who has you in charge tries a new experiment. He arms himself with a kind of an automatic hammering machine, somewhat similar to the steam riveter used in constructing steel office buildings, except that this one is more compact and can deliver about eighty-five more blows to the second. Thus equipped, he descends far below your high water mark and engages in aquatic sports and pastimes for a considerable period of time. It seems to you that you never saw a man who could go down and stay down as long as this young man can. You begin to feel that you misjudged his real vocation in life when you decided that he ought to be a boiler maker. You know that he was intended for pearl fishing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. He doesn't even have to come up to breathe, but stays below, knee deep in your tide wash, merrily knocking chunks off your lowermost coral reefs with his little steam riveter and having a perfectly lovely time.

You are overflowing copiously and you wish he would take the time to stop and bail you out. You abhor the idea of being drowned as an inside job. But no, he keeps right on and along about here it is customary for you to swoon away.

On recovering, you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is now going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First thoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he is setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. You can distinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod of mortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and another that have been left in the wings. You also judge that the insulation is burning off of an electric fixture somewhere up stage.

All this time the tooth is still offering resistance, and eventually the dentist comes out in front once more and makes a little curtain speech to you. He has just ascertained that what the tooth really needed was not filling but pulling. He thought at first that it should be filled and that is what he has been doing—filling it—but now he knows that pulling is the indicated procedure. He does not understand how a tooth that seemed so open could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will now pull the tooth.

He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He harvests small sections of the gum from time to time and occasionally he stops long enough to loosen up the roots as far down as your floating ribs. But he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull that tooth. Or if he spares any you are not able subsequently to remember what they were. You utter various loud sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and he lays back and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the tooth utters the death rattle and begins picking the cover-lid. And then he gives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower part of your spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges into the open panting but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for you to look at. If you didn't know it was your tooth you would take it for an old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected by the janitor.

It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you wouldn't have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that tooth forever. You never want to see it again.

As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage and corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling in the side of your jaw like a vacant lot. Your tongue keeps going over there to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole where the foundations used to be. You never realized before what a basement there was to a tooth.

As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the dentist welcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you hear the canary tuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are glad that he is the one who is going in and that you are the one who is coming out.

Science tells us that the teeth are the hardest things in the human composition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what science should do is to go on and finish the sentence. It means the hardest to keep.