Wearing the Crown

Today I get to spend spend an hour in the dental chair for a replacement crown. I need either a new one or a replacement every year it seems – sometimes two. I have all 32 teeth, or at least the roots and cores of them but 20 are capped. So, a dozen uncapped teeth remain at risk while any of the existing crowns could potentially need to be reworked, though a couple (both gold) are over 40 years old and fine. No one has fun in a dentist’s chair, but the greatest pain is paying the bill on the way out. “You can split the bill into two or more payments,” the young woman at the desk always helpfully offers. I decline and write out a check (yes I still have a checkbook rather than going all digital) for the full four figures while telling the story of the boy who cut off his dog’s tail a little bit at a time so it wouldn’t hurt as much. (I stole that story from my old high school math teacher Mr. Andre; he probably would have preferred I remembered how to do integrals.)
 
Prehistoric peoples by and large had excellent teeth from what we can tell by the skeletons we dig up. So do modern Inuit with an almost pure carnivorous diet; so do the few remaining modern pure hunter-gatherers (i.e. no farming or trade for farmed goods). However meritorious or foolish the paleo diet may be in other respects (I have no opinion on this), it seems to score on this count. Farming and consequent high grain diets changed everything. Grain mixed in saliva turns to sugar and attacks enamel, so ancient Sumerians and Egyptians had terrible teeth. Unsurprisingly, they invented dentistry as a specialized profession. Mostly dentists pulled teeth and fashioned bridges and dentures – often from human or animal teeth. Yet, fillings were an occasional thing. Remains of Etruscans dating to 700 BCE have been found with gold crowns on teeth.

 
Crowns, however, remained rare until 1903 when Dr. Charles Land created and popularized a porcelain jacket to replace the enamel on a tooth. The method spread rapidly though gold became preferred by some for being durable, noncorrosive, and easy on the gums – porcelain sometimes cracked. Nowadays improved ceramics – sometimes fused to a metallic base and sometimes 3D printed of one material – dominate though other types have not disappeared.
 
It has not escaped my memory that my mom and my dad each had a full set of crowns, each completing the set within a year of death. In case this is an unspoken family tradition, I’ll double down on brushing and flossing. I still have 12 with the original enamel, so I might not complete a full set for years.

 
OK, maybe some people have fun at the dentist. Jack Nicholson in the original Little Shop of Horrors (1960)