Gold teeth?

[Mission]

I got an email question from a writer who was reading my website and wanted to know how gold teeth were attached in the mouth. It took some effort to assemble the answer, so I thought I'd share it here. Maybe I'll stick it up on my website in the next month or two. Here is the answer:

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've never come across any mention of gold teeth on anyone during the Golden Age of Piracy. That appears to be yet another pop-culture addition to the legend and lore of pirates.

Here is about he closest thing I've seen. It is from Ambroise Paré's book "The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey":

“...other teeth artificially made of bone or Ivorie may bee put in the place of those that are wanting, and they must bee joined one fast unto another and also fastened to the natural teeth adjoining, that are whole; and this must chiefly bee don with a thred of gold or silver, or for want of either, with a common thred of silk or flax, as it is declared at large by Hippocrates...” (Paré, p. 577)

Elizabeth Bennion tells us more about period-era false teeth in her book "Antique Medical Instruments". Her comments suggest false teeth would be a luxury reserved for the rich, making it extraordinarily unlikely that a pirate would have access to any kind of false teeth at all. (Pirates would be EXTREMELY unlikely to reach the sort of people who served the rich. Such surgeons would be well-established land practitioners in places where pirates would usually not go without fear of being caught and hung.)

“In England the very rich might have had dentures by the end of the seventeenth century. The mouth would have been measured with compasses and the false teeth tied onto the natural ones with silk. A full lower set would be hand carved, often from one piece of ivory, but upper sets, being more difficult to keep in place, presented more problems. Walrus ivory was favoured but rhinoceros was used too. Sometimes human teeth were set in tinted ivory gums (in desperate cases, animal teeth were used). For fashionable use at Court, teeth might be of silver or mother of pearl, and Lord Hervey astonished his friends in 1735 by appearing with teeth carved from Italian Agate.” (Bennion, p. 249)

She also gives some interesting details on how false teeth were fashioned.

“All these [false] teeth had to be removed for eating, though some women had their gums pierced with hooks to keep the teeth in place. The Parisian dentist Fauchard, in the early eighteenth century, fastened the upper and lower sets together with a steel spring, but constant pressure was needed to keep the mouth closed.” (Bennion, p. 249)

So the short answer? Gold teeth are inaccurate if you're trying to be historically correct. A pirate having any false teeth at all would be very, very unlikely.

[Bright]

http://youtu.be/fn9pYtUoM20