The leaping dentures of France

Literary Review - John Brewer on the French Smile Revolution

Also from Literary Review, here's a piece about the change in smiling and dentistry in 18th century France.

I liked this paragraph, with its particularly amusing final image:

 The 18th-century cult of sensibility, spread through performances on the
Parisian stage and nurtured by novels of deep emotional intensity by
the likes of Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, loosened the grip of the
costive, courtly smile. Charming and tender smiles - transparent
expressions of feeling intended to be shared by all men and women,
though, in practice, chiefly enjoyed by the Parisian cultural and social
elite - became fashionable. Teeth and smiles were chic - and so were
dentists. Practitioners like Pierre Fauchard made dental care a
profession: they abandoned the street (where teeth had been brutally
pulled by colourful showmen like 'Le Grand Thomas', who operated on the
Pont Neuf and was known as the 'Pearl of the Charlatans' and 'Terror of
the Human Jaw') and set up offices (upstairs so the patients' screams
could not be heard in the street below) in fashionable spots like the
Rue Saint-Honoré. They encouraged tooth conservation, not brutal
extraction, wrote treatises that established dentistry as a science, and
emphasised the importance of patient self-care, which helped them
peddle a succession of cleaners, whiteners, gargles, toothpicks and
breath sweeteners. Fauchard invented spring-loaded denture sets, which,
as Jones reminds us, 'had the unfortunate habit of leaping dramatically
out of the owner's mouth at unguarded moments'.