🦷 The cold, hard tooth 🦷

The tooth fairy is about to make you RICH because those chompers are comin' out

I’m not really big in “bringing things back” because usually when people want to revert backwards, they’re championing racism and other forms of systemic oppression. But! After doing my reading fort his week’s story, I may be reviving the term “nervous disorder” because a.) I kind of like that it makes me feel like I may be describing an Italian Greyhound and not my asshole brain and b.) I’ve learned about the potential for puns!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first: Who’s watched The Knick? It was a drama on Cinemax (weird, I know. Who has Cinemax? What year is this?) featuring a very sweaty Clive Owen doing something that almost resembled an American accent and there was a lot of fake blood because it was about a hospital in New York at turn of the 20th century.

Anyway, for those who haven’t seen it (which I assume is everyone?), John Hodgman (!) has a cameo in which he plays a quack doctor whose solution for a woman’s PROFOUND AND REASONABLE grief is to remove. Her. Teeth.

All of them. Just take ‘em out. The teeth, he believed, were making her crazy.

Now, you may be thinking “oh, TV show, probably doing dramatic stuff for dramatic effect” but no. No, my sweet dear.

John Hodgman plays Dr. Henry Cotton, an actual human who actually practiced medicine and who believed that the removal of a person’s teeth might fix their brain wobblies.

🦷🦷🦷🦷🦷🦷

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Cotton was, as the kids say, a real piece of work. He studied under some of the most elite doctors of his day — but unfortunately, that day was the Victorian era, when people were pretty sure literally anything but faulty wiring could be blamed for mental illnesses.

Like a lot of people at the time, Dr. Cotton believed in the “hygienic” school of psychiatry — which basically meant he thought mood disorders were the result of phantom infections in the body, not unlike those Woo Woo White Ladies on Instagram who will tell you that inflation is behind every single thing. In order to get the infection out, doctors often had to just remove the problem (or the suspected problem, as was more often the case).

This included excising the sinuses, tonsils, testicles (YUP), or ovaries (my god). But only if the teeth, ostensibly because they’re the easiest ones to access, had been removed and the patient had shown no sign of improvement.

Dr. Cotton committed the cardinal sin of exploratory medicine, though, which is that he had already decided that his treatment would work, so he made sure that his notes and study reflected its efficacy. But it’s not like he was doing double-blind trials. He was just removing body parts from patients and then deciding whether or not they were cured.

Dr. Cotton so thoroughly believed in his treatments, he was willing to crow about them to the press. In 1918, he stated that he was “doing them [the fucking teeth removals] daily.” In 1922, he was profiled in the New York Times, wherein the glowing review stated that “at the State Hospital at Trenton, N.J., under the brilliant leadership of the medical director, Dr. Henry A. Cotton, there is on foot the most searching, aggressive, and profound scientific investigation that has yet been made of the whole field of mental and nervous disorders….there is hope, high hope...for the future.”

Not everyone was so convinced about Dr. Tooth Yanker’s methods. Dr. Phyllis Greenacre, a truly bad bitch in the field of psychiatry at the time, visited Cotton’s state hospital (well, she was kind of forced by her misogynist boss at Johns Hopkins who sent her on a research trip basically to make her go away) and saw a whole bunch of people who could neither speak nor eat properly and was like “hmm, this is weird.”

Instead of taking the hint, Dr. Greenacre did some research, talked (kind of) to the patients, and generally felt around. What she found was that a lot of Cotton’s patients died, which was not ideal. Plus, his research work was an abject disaster, which meant he was essentially deforming these people for seemingly no scientific reason.

Dr. Greenacre was taken moderately seriously — she was a woman, after all — but there was political resistance when it came to finding Cotton, then the medical director at the State of New Jersey Hospital and a frequent “psychiatric expert” in court cases, anything other than credible. A lot of of reputations were going to be sunk if his “treatments” were found to be harmful.

It was hard not to see that SOMETHING was up, though. Another investigator had also found that Dr. Cotton was treating epileptics with copious amounts of alcohol and a number of well-to-do society types had sought his treatment to predictable disasterous results. But the board stood by their man and eventually Cotton ended up opening a private practice so that he could make more money with do so with less bother and scrutiny. A lot of otherwise smart, upstanding people watched him butcher his patients and failed to do anything. The more things change!

Cotton died of a heart attack when he was just 56, but not before both — yes, both — of his sons took their own lives. He had taken their teeth out and the teeth of his wife as a “preventative” health measure.

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To his VERY scant credit, Dr. Cotton did try some progressive care practices (like uhhh not manually restraining people? So? Thanks?) and he was willing to try new things which we always like to see. And of course, antibiotics weren’t a thing yet and hand-washing before surgery was still viewed as a kind of fringe idea. So “infection” did seem like a kind of curse that just settling in for no good reason. And sepsis can make people hallucinate, so it’s not entirely 100% untrue that an infection could make a person display the symptoms of a mental illness.

But still. The treatments that Dr. Cotton inflicted on patients were barbaric, absolutely unscientific, and absolutely did much more harm that good.

Cotton’s fuckshit “medical treatments” cast a long shadow. For D E C A D E S, people continued to believe that mysterious mouth infections led to “nervous” disorders. Tooth powder companies used this believe to shill their products, as did dentists and other medical practitioners. If you weren’t taking care of your mouth, you may lose your head!

Which like, ok, oral health is a big deal. Dentists in schools are an absolutely critical health intervention that we should be making to help level the playing field for marginalized kids and it’s absolutely horrifying that we don’t cover basic dental care in this country. But!

Mental health care may often feel like pulling teeth (SEE? JOKES) and you may get a little nervous when you’re in the dentist’s chair. But if you’ve got a nervous condition, it’s nice to know that in this, 2022, you can safely assume you’ll leave your shrink’s office with your whole mouth intact.