EDITOR’S NOTE: This article appears in the April 5, 2004, issue of National Review.

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.

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