COLUMN: Dental care has come a long way since I was a boy
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The Postie Notes by Mark Gilbert
Dental care and teeth have come a long way since I was a boy. I can remember spending a lot of time in the dentist's chair, at Mr. Philips' surgery in Northampton, and dentists in the 1960s didn’t take any prisoners. Mr. Philips had a kinder reputation than Mr. Melville, aka “Melville the Butcher” in Kingsthorpe, but not much kinder!
In those days dentists used gas to knock you out to extract teeth, the gas was nitrous oxide (laughing gas), and was banned from use as a general anaesthetic for dental care outside of a hospital dental unit in 2001. I can remember one particularly upsetting visit where I had a mouthful of teeth before he gassed me and woke up later with 13 missing. I wasn’t laughing then.
At that time dentures, or false teeth, were the only replacement for missing teeth and were mostly uncomfortable for wearers.
I remember folk either forgetting their false teeth, losing them, getting pips under them, or more amusingly, coughing them out if they sneezed too hard. And of course, they had to go in a glass of water overnight – sexy!
By the time I needed any replacement teeth, there were crowns, which, although expensive at least stayed in. Crowns can be fitted as a cap over an existing tooth, or on a post, which is how mine are fitted. I have always been pleased with my crowns, apart from one bad experience with two Irish wolfhounds. When they play, Irish wolfhounds often stand on their hind legs and box, like kangaroos, and then they are over six feet tall. I somehow got in between my Guinness and Lucy and got hit by a rock hard claw, which not only removed a front crown, but also broke the post off! It didn’t hurt at the time, but the numerous visits to the dentist to repair it hurt a lot.
Dental care has evolved and now there is an array of treatments, including bridges, veneers, implants, and trendy braces. I remember when a person with braces was laughed at. How times change. But the trend for veneers is interesting, whereby it seems that everyone has a pearly white smile with perfect teeth, sometimes too bright, and quite unnatural. Coronation Street is supposed to reflect northern England working class life, yet now everyone has a dazzling set of gnashers, Go to Manchester and you’ll see this is not the the case.
Back to dentures, I have two little stories. One involves gold teeth, which are often used as a crown, or on dentures, and are a status symbol in some parts of the world. My mother-in-law Hedi had a set of dentures with several gold teeth on them and I asked her if I could weigh in the gold when she passed away, it was an ongoing joke, and on her final stay in hospital she reminded me that I could do so. Anyway, after she passed away, I took the gold to a dealer and came away with a few hundred pounds. Job done.
The other story is about old Mr. Briggs. The head of a rural family at Upper Slawit (Slaithwaite), he was a diminutive, fit old man.
John Kenyon, the regular postie always recalled the day he praised him for delivering on a Sunday. It wasn’t, but John said they didn’t know what day it was up there. Anyway, I met Mr Briggs one day in the late 90s repairing a drystone wall in the rain and he had the biggest set of dentures I’ve ever seen, like a set of horse's teeth. How he kept them in was a mystery, perhaps it was Fixodent?
Mark Gilbert is a postman at Bettyhill.
