Bad Breath in the 1860s: Tooth Powders, Cloves and Battlefield False Teeth

By daylight I pull teeth and by moonlight I pull corks, and both trades end with a man on the floor thanking me. I am Doctor George G. Wilkins of Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, Merrimack County. My operating chair is an old ox-yoke bench with a horsehair cushion that has heard more screaming than a Concord gallows. My instruments hang on nails beside the forge: turnkey, forceps, gum lancet, and a mallet I am not proud of. There are two plagues I know as well as any man living, bad breath and worse neighbors. I spend my days with my fingers in the first and my evenings with my shutters closed against the second.

The Bell Before the Funeral

Bad breath is the bell that rings before the funeral. Folk tell me the wife will not kiss them, the horse will not let them near his nose, and the minister has moved them to the back pew. I bid them open, and there it lies. A molar black as a stovepipe. Gums swollen purple and bleeding at a touch. Last Thursday's salt pork wedged in the cracks and turned to cheese, and a tongue furred over like a Coos County trapper's mitten. Whatever your grandmother told you, the stink does not rise from the stomach. Nine times in ten it comes from the mouth itself, rotting right there on the porch.

Consider Deacon Absalom Pickering of the upper road. He is a pious man who never missed a meeting, and his breath could strip the varnish off a coffin lid. In March he came to me with a lower molar so far gone that under the forceps it did not so much come out as surrender. It came away in three pieces, and the smell from that socket sent my apprentice out to stand in the rain for a quarter hour. When the Deacon asked if it was bad, I told him his breath was so foul the flies at his funeral would file a grievance. I am told he tithed less that month, out of spite.

Chalk, Charcoal and Oil of Cloves

The honest Yankee buys his tooth powder from a peddler, in a little tin with a lady's face on the lid. Inside are powdered chalk, burnt charcoal, cuttlefish bone ground fine as flour, and a little orris root to make it smell of violets. The charcoal blackens the gums and scours like a stove brush. I have seen men scrub with it so faithfully that they wore their front teeth down to little gray pegs, like a row of fence posts after a flood. Use it gently or not at all. A hog-bristle brush on a bone handle, some plain chalk and a mouthful of water will serve you better than the Professor's Celebrated Oriental Pearl Dentifrice at fifty cents a tin.

For a toothache I reach for oil of cloves. Dabbed on the gum, it numbs the spot like a frost and makes the whole chair smell like a Christmas ham, which comforts the patient right up until I take up the forceps. Many folk chew cloves, parsley or fennel seed to sweeten the breath before courting or church. That is like hanging a wreath on a privy door: pleasant to approach, but the business inside goes on as before.

Dead Men's Teeth and Patent Leeches

The war rotted more mouths than it buried men. Our boys came home from the Virginia camps after months of hardtack and salt horse with no fresh green thing, and the scurvy had got into them. Their gums went spongy and bled, and their teeth sat loose as pegs in a rotted gate. Last fall a sergeant from Epsom sat in my chair wiggling his own eyetooth. I gave him a bushel of apples and told him to eat greens like a goat, and his gums firmed up by Thanksgiving. The teeth he had already lost stayed lost.

When a man has lost his whole fence row, the new teeth come from ivory, bone, porcelain from the city shops, and some, God help us, from the dead. After Waterloo the scavengers went over that field with pliers before the bodies were cold, and the teeth went to London dentists by the barrel. They were called Waterloo teeth, and fine ladies smiled with dead Frenchmen's molars. It is said there were jackals at the same work after Antietam and Gettysburg, so some banker's wife in Boston may be chewing her roast beef on a Georgia farm boy's teeth.

Plates are now set in vulcanized rubber by Mr. Goodyear's process, pink as a newborn rat. Since last year, however, the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company has sent its agents to every dentist in the country to demand a license fee on every rubber plate. I told their agent I would pay his royalty the day he paid for the teeth he was standing on. Barnaby, my black bear, rattled his chain, and the man remembered an urgent appointment in Concord. Then there is the Revenue Act of 1862, which did not stop at taxing whiskey. It laid a federal license on the trades and named dentists right alongside physicians and surgeons. So the Union charges me a license for my forceps and a tax on my worm, getting me coming and going out of the same mouth.

A Cent with My Name on It

A gossip is a mouth with no bottom on it and a neighbor stuck to the top. A while back the county sheriff came out to Fort Wilkins on a tip. He knew where my barrels stood, which night I fired the still, and even the knot in the floorboard where I keep the jug for visiting clergy. The county paid its informers in hard coin, and coin is scarce in these war years. In the county box sat a copper cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., punched on my own anvil, which had wandered off in change like a stray dog.

Three weeks later Horace Grubb, overseer at the mill, a man with a face like a boiled ham and a soul to match, laid that very cent on the store counter to buy a twist of tobacco. The only fresh coin anyone in Pittsfield had seen that month was the county reward, so Horace has not had a peaceful pew since. Six months on, he sat in my chair with an abscess the size of a robin's egg. I pulled that tooth slow, very slow, and charged him one cent, with my stamp on it.

There was also the peddler out of Barnstead way, who sold Professor Peabody's Rose Dentifrice forty tins at a time. He had eyed my copper worm in daylight, for copper is dear these war years and a scrap man in Manchester pays real money for it. He crept back by night in his stocking feet. A bear does not sleep like a Christian. Barnaby took him by the whole seat, wool, drawers, and a fist-sized portion of meat besides. Then the sample case burst on the stones, and Barnaby dropped the man to eat all forty tins, lids and all. The peddler crawled off through my squash patch, and I hear he now leads the treble in a Barnstead choir.

Birch Twigs and Persimmon Sermons

Miss Clara Higgins, an herb woman come up by the cars from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, brought the mountain remedies. Her granny scrubbed her teeth with a chewed switch of sweet birch, frayed like a paintbrush, that tasted of wintergreen. Her granddaddy chewed through half a sapling on the four-mile walk to court her. He arrived smelling like a horse liniment bottle, his lips too numb to say her name, and still married her in June. She also told of a Floyd County preacher who railed against popskull and tanglefoot from the pulpit, then shook every hand at the church door with wild persimmon brandy on his breath. And she told of seven hogs drunk on Pruitt's worked cider pomace, which ended a thirty-year line-fence feud with the Coles.

Her Aunt Delphie made each courting boy whistle Shady Grove at the door, because a boy with liquor in him only spits and wheezes. One boy had chewed a raw onion to hide the smell, and she sent him off with this: 'Son, an onion is a liar's overcoat. It don't hide the body, it just tells everybody you're wearing one.'

The Same Devil in Mouth and Still

Here my two trades meet in one smell. The bad-egg, boiled-cabbage stink of the Deacon's molar is sulfur bred in the rot. When fermented mash warms in the pot, sulfur rides up in the vapour too, the very same family of stinks. The chemists will someday call them hydrogen sulfide and methyl mercaptan, but your nose is all you need. Copper takes hold of those sulfur vapours on its own skin, and the spirit comes out the far end sweeter. Copper is the tooth powder of the still. Scrub it after every run, or the cure turns to crust.

Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and what I set down here is history and education. The first of the run is poison: the foreshots and heads smell as sharp as a lamp-spirit bottle and blind men and stop hearts. They go on the ground or in the lamp, never in a cup. The hearts are the honest middle. The tails come oily at the end, smelling of wet dog and old socks. Cut wide. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor like a cat looking for a spark. Keep the fire low and steady, keep a bucket of water and a wet blanket by the door, and never leave a running still. A Northwood man stepped out for a pipe and came back to find his still-house gone, and his eyebrows went with it. Join your copper with silver solder or proper fittings, never lead.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is potash and lime, the stuff your granny leaches for soft-soap lye. It makes a soap nobody can wash with and a whiskey nobody can drink. The heads boil off early whatever you put in the keg, and the only cure is to cut them off. Charred white oak in a barrel does improve whiskey over months and years. Red oak, though, is so open in the grain that coopers call it a sieve with ambitions, and shavings of it give only a bitter, puckering tannin, like chewing an acorn.

As for the blue flame: the poison in the heads burns pale blue, near invisible, the same as good spirit. A blue flame proves only that there is alcohol in the spoon, and the red-flame saying will no more find lead than a dowsing rod will find your wife's temper. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.