Christoph Muller and his golden tooth, 1593
When you smile, you reveal your teeth. Before the adoption of regular dental hygiene and the development of the first mass-produced toothbrush in 1780 by William Addis, people were loathe to smile because of the parlous state of their teeth. This is why the subjects of many portraits until the 19th century rarely had anything other than a fixed expression with mouth firmly shut.
In 1593 in the remote village of Weigelsdorf in Silesia, in what is now south-western Poland, a seven-year-old boy by the name of Christoph Muller astonished onlookers with his smile. When he opened his mouth, there for all to see was a golden tooth. News of this phenomenon quickly spread far and wide, soon reaching the ears of Dr Jakob Horst, a professor of medicine at Julius University in Helmstadt. Jumping on his horse, the intrepid Dr Horst rushed to Silesia to investigate the phenomenon for himself.
On getting Christoph to open his mouth, Dr Horst prodded around, using a touchstone, a piece of jasper commonly used at the time to test the alloy of gold, and satisfied himself that the tooth was indeed made of gold, albeit not of the highest quality. Satisfied that he had a major scoop on his hands, the doctor put quill to paper and produced a treatise, running to 145 pages, on the subject, entitled De aureo dente maxillari pueri Silesii, or for non-Latinists, Of the golden tooth of the boy from Silesia.
Even allowing for the grandiloquence of the day 145 pages is a lot to fill when you are writing about a tooth, even one made of gold. Not unsurprisingly then, Dr Horst began to engage in speculation as to how the tooth arrived in Christoph’s mouth and what it all meant. Noting that the boy had been born on 22nd December 1585, a day when there had been an unusual alignment of the planets, he speculated that this might have caused a sufficient rise in the sun’s temperature to cause the bone in Christoph’s jaw to turn to gold. The good doctor did not seem to pause to consider why other children born on the same day weren’t wandering around with a mouthful of gold.
As to what it all meant Horst argued that the tooth was a portent of a new golden age for the Holy Roman Empire. However, as the tooth was in the left-hand side of the boy’s mouth, the left being considered to represent misfortune and evil, there would be a series of calamities before the dawning of a new age.
But not everyone was as convinced as Horst that Christoph’s golden tooth was a miraculous event. In particular, a Scotsman, a pragmatic and down-to-earth race, if there ever was one, Duncan Liddell, a physician based in Helmstadt, argued in another treatise, Tractatus de dente aureo pueri Silesiani, that the only explanation was that the tooth was man-made.
Who was right?
The passage of time demonstrated that Horst had been duped. The boy’s use of his tooth coupled with regular experiments with touchstones to examine the constituency of the molar, resulted in the gold wearing away. In fact, the tooth, far from being solid gold, was coated with a thin layer of the metal. Christoph became reluctant to allow further examinations of his tooth to take place, a decision which sufficiently enraged a drunken nobleman to stab him in the cheek. The doctor, called upon to stitch Christoph up, soon found that the tooth was a clever hoax.
The man who had performed the operation reportedly fled the village, leaving his name to be lost in the mists of time. Poor Christoph, however, was flung in jail for his part in perpetrating the fraud. On the bright side, however, this hoax is thought to have been the first documented case of fitting what we would call a gold crown to a tooth.
If you are unfortunate enough to have to have a crown fitted, pause and give a thought to Christoph Muller.
windowthroughtime 