The article did mention Tobias Schmidt - sometimes my posts can run over so I was trying to keep things brief.  I thought Dr Guillotin did the paperwork and then Herr Schmidt actually made the apparatus but seems it was not so simple.  I'll have to look out the article again.  There was mention about one forerunner of the machine having been the Halifax gibet. I always thought the gibet was a type of scaffold - well one lives and learns but thanks for the extra info, MM.  The article did pick up on Guillotin being against capital punishment - I took it that he favoured that the machine could actually make the death quick rather than a protracted act of torture.

Meles meles wrote:

Dr Guillotine also did not invent his eponymous instrument.

Similar devices had been around for centuries, including in England and Scotland, but the specific design of the French model followed from the experiments and improvements by the surgeon Antoine Louis (who was the secretary of the surgical academy) together with the German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt and with the assistance of France's main executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson. It was Schmidt who built the prototype machine and who suggested placing the blade at an oblique 45-degree angle and changing it from the round blade. Additional refinements to the release mechanism and the victim constraints were made in 1890 by Leon Berger, an assistant executioner and carpenter.

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin's role was in promoting the device which later came to bear his name but with a feminine persona ie. la guillotine. He was an elected Deputy to the National Assembly and belonged to a small reform movement that sought to banish the death penalty completely, however as an interim step towards ending execution, he advocated the adoption of a "machine that beheads painlessly". Through contact with his fellow surgeon, Antoine Louis, Guillotin was aware of the development of the device, although when he claimed in a 1789 debate about changes to France's Penal code that such a machine already existed he was largely derided by his fellow Deputies. Nevertheless following a series of experiments on cadavers, Louis and Schmidt's device was accepted for official use. The prototype was originally called a 'louisette', after Antoine Louis, but it subsequently picked up Guillotin's name, partly as he was a prominent advocate of its adoption, but also because during a government debate he once made the casual, blackly humorous comment, "Now, with my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it." The statement quickly became a popular joke, and few days later a comic song about Guillotin and "his" machine circulated, forever tying his name to it. As one who was actually against capital punishment Guillotin hated having the device named after him and indeed so embarrassed were his family about it that after his death in 1814 they petitioned the French government to change the name of the instrument. The government refused so the Guillotin's family changed their name instead. (His wife seems to have reverted to using her maiden name of Saugrain).

LadyinRetirement wrote:

... he died "bonne mort" (is that of natural causes).

Of natural causes is une mort naturelle .. une bonne mort is just a good death, but which does usually imply peacefully in bed of old age. Dr Guillotin died in bed at the age of 75 and of natural causes, but specifically from an infected wound on his shoulder, so his final hours might not have been all that bonne.

Thank you again for this piece of history MM. Never heard about the details up to now. I learn a lot of history thanks to you and to "your" meals linked to history.

Kind regards from Paul.

Although Dr Guillotin didn't meet his end by the guillotine, there was one other who had been involved in the device's development who did meet his end by it: Louis XVI. As an enlightened monarch and a genarally humane man, king Louis XVI had shown interest in the machine as a way of making executions fool-proof and painless, and had openly supported Guillotine and the others in their attempts to reform the penal code. It is even said he suggested some refinements to the guillotine himself, although I rather suspect, as with the Kim Jong-un's notebook-scribbling underlings who always seem to be hanging on the Great Leader's every words, that when a model of the guillotine was demonstrated to Louis XVI, the designers just sycophantically agreed with whatever the king said. Anyway, even if none of his advice was eventually adopted, Louis did sign into law the guillotine's official use ... only to end up on its sharp end just over a year later.

Another one on the design team who might also have ended his days with the National Barber, was the state executioner himself, Charles-Henri Sanson, although in his case it was unlikely to have been for crimes against the state but simply for incompetence.


Charles-Henri Sanson.

Sanson’s career as an executioner in Paris got off to a rocky start. At just sixteen-years-old he inherited the position from his father, Jean Baptiste Sanson, who had inherited the job from his father, whose father had in turn been the first Sanson to hold the title. Like his predecessors, it seems it was not a job the young Sanson liked but rather a duty — and one that he doesn't seem to have been particularly cut out for. At his first execution, in January of 1755, he let his aides do all the dirty work with the axe, whilst he "acquitted himself shamefully, recoiling and turning his head from the horrible sight."

Then, just two years later there was an assassination attempt on the king, when Robert-Francois Damiens stabbed Louis XV with a knife. Fortunately for the king his many layers of clothing prevented the blade from doing any damage, but unfortunately for Damiens, he was still sentenced to the full penalty for attempted regicide. Accordingly he was condemned to be tortured with red-hot pincers; then burned with boiling oil, burning pitch and molted lead; and then hanged, drawn and quartered. No-one had been quartered in France since Henri IV's assassination in 1610 and so no Sanson had ever had to deal with anything so extreme. The execution order quite frankly terrified the queasy eighteen year-old executioner.

His elderly father was too far away to go to for help and so he sought advice locally from his grandmother, explaining he wasn’t up to the task and that he was ready to resign. But Grandma Sanson wouldn’t let him sherk the duty for reasons of family honour. Instead she summoned her other son, Gabriel, the executioner of Reims, for help. On March 28, two days after the decree, the two Sansons set about carrying out the execution order ... let's just say it didn't go entirely to plan; after three attempts the four horses were struggling to complete the procedure and so the two horrified Sansons had to get an axe to finish the job themselves.

A few years later Charles-Henri botched another job. Count de Lally-Tollendal had been sentenced to death on a frivolous charge of having betrayed the king’s interests. Lally-Tollendal was an old aquaintence of Sanson's father, Jean-Baptiste, who had once promised the count, jokingly, that if they ever met on the scaffold, that he would promise to ensure a swift end. When de Lally-Tollendal’s joke later became a reality, Jean Baptiste came out of retirement to accompany his son at the execution. He explained to the count that he wished to keep his promise but that he could no longer handle the heavy double-edged sword effectively. He would however see to it that his son lived up to the promise. When the moment arrived, de Lally-Tollendal was courageous upon the platform, but was still nervous and had trouble staying perfectly still under the stroke of Sanson junior’s blade. Between the count's nervousness and that of the younger Sanson, the blow missed and failed to kill him outright. The count apparently sprang up and looked reproachfully at Jean Baptiste Sanson, who, recovering for the moment all his former strength, snatched the sword from the hand of his son, and, with one skilful stroke, completed the fatal work.

So, all in all, it is not perhaps unsurprising that Charles-Henri Sanson was eager to help Antoine Louis and Tobias Schmidt perfect their guillotine, so as to take the hit-and-miss out of the procedure and leave him, as executioner, with the fool-proof task of merely pulling the cord to release the weighted blade.

It was Charles-Henri Sanson who executed both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, as well as nearly 3,000 other people over his forty-year career. His son Henri, and then his grandson, Henri-Clément, both carried on the family business becoming the last generations of unfortunate Sanson executioners. The family’s reign of terror ended in 1847 after Henri-Clément found himself in debt and pawned the guillotine. As luck would have it the government needed a beheading done shortly after. But Sanson no longer had the guillotine nor the funds to recover it, so the government had to chip in and buy it back from the pawn broker. They then fired Henri-Clément who was probably relieved his punishment did not involve his former tool.

"National Barber" - I've not heard that one before MM.  I always think of the harpsichord as being a soothing sounding instrument but since I've learned of Herr Schmidt's involvement in making the misnamed guillotine I don't know if I'll ever look at one in quite the same way again (harpsichord).  In Spanish we did something about the life of Beethoven.  For next lesson (in two weeks' time as he and his wife are away next week) the teacher wants us to prepare something about a composer in Spanish.  I might do Elizabeth Lutyens.  I'm sure there are other female composers but she was the one that popped into my head.  Before the Brontes and other female writers of the 19th century I'm sure there were earlier female writers of note   There was Aphra Benn who was mentioned in the female spies thread of course and Madame de Lafayette is thought by some to have been the writer of La Princesse de Cleves but before then I can only think offhand of Christine de Pisan and Lady Murasaki (Japanese - The Tale of Genji) though there must have been others.

Deleted.

I don't know if this is exactly a "myth" but it is certainly a mistake I made.  Something else (besides the fact that there are wolverines in part of Europe, mentioned on another thread) that I learned from recent "leisure" reading was that all these years I have been misattributing "Hell hath no fury to a woman scorned to William Shakespeare whereas the quote is slightly wrong and was coined by William Congreve in a play called The Mourning Bride.  The actual quote is "Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd/ Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned".  I'm sure Temperance never made that mistake.  I'm providing a link to an article from The Telegraph which gives 10 misquotes.  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/.../Ten-literary-quotes-we-all-get-wrong.html

Lady,

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/10556095/Ten-literary-quotes-we-all-get-wrong.html

See you later on the evening...

Kind regards from Paul.

I'm really not sure whether this is a myth or not.  I had heard (or read?) that whirlpools circle clockwise in the northern hemisphere, just drain straight down on the Equator and circle anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere.  (Where's Caro???)  I had a look on YouTube and some people said it was true and other people said it depended more on the shape of the article that was emptying (if it was a plughole it would depend on the shape of the sink.  I always thought it to be true but there is one man in the USA (Alabama from memory) who shows two adjacent sinks in his home emptying in opposite directions (in the northern hemisphere).  Do any of our science buffs on Res Hist know the truth of the matter?  
I linked a YouTube video which shows when I am in typing or edit mode but I can't see it in "posted" mode so I will give an ordinary (i.e. not YouTube) link to it.  https://youtu.be/mXaad0rsV38   I know there are some videos that won't play unless they are actually on the YouTube platform.  When I was first learning sign language I found a program which played YouTube videos slowly (so I had more time to process the signs and the fingerspelling but some videos wouldn't work in it).

Lady,

I stay corrected and it is all logical and that of the huricanes was of course the ultimate convincing.
I saw the question inconclusive on several fora including the BBC...
What one all learns on this small forum from only twenty!!! active members...chapeau!

Kind regards from Paul.

Ah ... so that's why in the southern hemisphere snails usually coil the other way and the colours of the rainbow are reversed. Also why it is traditional for a southern waltz to go clockwise, port is passed to the right in Australia, and why people with ringlets suddenly find their hair goes straight, or even kinks the other way, as they pass the equator.



Seriously though I think all these supposedly observed effects, including the water swirling away down the plug, have been thoroughly debunked. The Earth's coriolis force works on a global scale to influence oceanic currents and big weather systems, like the trade winds and hurricanes, but not on the small scale where there are far bigger factors influencing things like the flow of water out of a sink.

So the data is inconclusive then?  I took the information as gospel when I first heard it but the YouTube video showed some experiments that "proved" the claim and some that "disproved" it so I still don't know whether it is true or an urban myth.  What MM says about the colours of the rainbow seems to be true though (haven't checked on the snails yet)  https://tasmaniangeographic.com/guide-to-rainbows/ though I do think his second sentence above may be in jest.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

So the data is inconclusive then?   

No ... anecdotes are not data.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

What MM says about the colours of the rainbow seems to be true though (haven't checked on the snails yet)

Oops - I meant that as a joke! Rainbows must surely be unaffected by where you are in the World, and snails, even ordinary garden ones in England, can sometimes be found twisted the other way. It think occurs early in their embryonic development (like how flat fish embryos turn to lay on their side). If their is a genetic predisposition to turn opposite to the usual way, then it rapidly dies out as left-handed snails cannot mate with right-handers, so the population of any species tends to be nearly all one way, with only a few lonely oddities

Well, the tasmaniographic.com link above does say rainbows appear differently in the southern hemisphere.  I don't see her often but my sister-in-law is from Bogota in Colombia so I could ask her I suppose.  I realised that the second sentence of MM's statement was in jest.  It could all stem from something as simple as an April Fool's joke becoming part of popular folklore.  Now I don't know that the anecdote about which way the whirly-swirly water whirly-swirled WAS an April Fool's joke - that's just me surmising one possibility.

One of my uncles told me that their family dog was a "pedigree golden hind".  The dog was golden in colour but he was more like a pedigree Heinz 57-varieties.

That Tasmanian rainbow site actually says:

"On different planets, in different atmospheres with different mists, rainbows may appear in different colours. But the familiar spectrum of a rainbow is consistent throughout our Planet Earth." my emphasis. And I note all their photos of 'normal' rainbows have the red end of the spectrum on the outer side of the arc and blue towards the inner side ... which is exactly how rainbows appear in Europe or North America. I meant my comment as a silly joke, but your response did make me pause for thought and quickly check that the joke hadn't actually back-fired on to me.

So what about waltzes - do they always go anticlockwise?

Mea culpa, I looked rather too cursorily, MM.  I hope I haven't metamorphosed into Grumpy Old Woman so much that I can't appreciate a joke...One hears things and although a google search brings information I guess one cannot always be sure that anything is true.  It's a long time since I danced a waltz so your guess is as good as mine.  The lady goes backwards so it's a bit confusing.

MM, I know you were "......'aving a larf'...." but in this clip of a waltz the couples seem to predominantly rotate clockwise, the main circle anyway, but they do occasionally reverse and go the other way!  

Ah but what would those colonials know?! ... in a proper Viennese waltz, as indeed all formal ballroom dances, while the couples themselves may rotate clockwise (the so called natural direction of turn), the movement around the room, the line of dance,  should always be in an anticlockwise direction. This has been normal practice since at least the beginning of the 19th century ... at least that's the way I was always taught to dance.

From wiki:
"The Line of dance (LOD or LoD) is conceptually a path along and generally parallel to the edge of the dance floor in the counterclockwise direction. To help avoid collisions, it is agreed that in travelling dances dancers should proceed along the line of dance."

This all probably came about because when dancing couples became closer to each other, as with the shamefully intimate waltz, the woman leaned against the man's right shoulder, his sword being on his left hip, and thus as a consequence the natural direction of their rotation would be clockwise, and hence their movement around the room would naturally be anti-clockwise, and for practical reasons, all couples would of course adopt the same direction or line of dance, going anticlockwise around the room.

Temp ... you were, still are, a dancer. What's the professional opinion?

Sounds logical, MM - about avoiding the sword.  I'm sure I heard on the radio once is that the reason we drive on the left (in this country anyway)* is to keep our sword arms free.  Or will that turn out to be another myth.  I'm not well versed in when other countries adopted riding/driving on the right side of the road (or had they always done ridden/driven thus).

* I don't have a car and am unlikely to get one at my time of life.  I have had a letter from DVLA saying I need to do another test next birthday if I am to continue with my licence.  Actually I don't like driving.  Obviously everyone can work out how old I will be next birthday now.

If driving on one side of the road or the other has been mentioned before on another thread, I apologise.  I looked on google and came across this article https://www.worldstandards.eu/cars/driving-on-the-left/  Among other matters, it mentions Sweden changing from the left to the right back in 1967 - I can vaguely remember that being on the news.  I was interested to read that although in a 1955 vote on the matter - of those who voted 82.9% elected to keep driving on the left but the change took place anyway.  I don't know if there were other votes in between until the government got what they wanted.  Reading through the article it seems a logical decision in a way because neighbouring Norway drove on the right* and it was a fiddle-faddle for drivers crossing the border.  Mind you, I have only read this one article on the subject (recently at least) and while I have never been a journalist my understanding is that journalists are advised to get three independent sources before "going" with a story so perhaps I should do some more background reading on the matter.

* Knowing that some members of the board have a very proper command of English I suppose I should have said "drivers in Norway drove on the left".  Of course countries do not drive!!

Oops, the Lady got it wrong again.  I thought Master Wobbleweapon had written the quotation "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel but seems it was Samuel Johnson.  https://www.samueljohnson.com/refuge.html  Seeing SJ was from not-so-sunny-today Staffordshire (different town [well Lichfield is a city as it has a cathedral]) I should have known that one.

Apparently Bram Stoker (who wrote Dracula) believed a legend that the real Queen Elizabeth I (well she would have been a princess at the time) died around the age of 12 and a panicked household went to the nearby village of Bisley to seek out a young girl of around the same age of a similar height and colouring.  Unfortunately they were only able to find a boy and henceforward the village boy was passed off as Elizabeth with all those who were "in the know" being given dire threats and warnings.  Myself I think it's just a legend - I mean at that time Henry VIII's son was still alive and nobody knew the important part Elizabeth I would play in the (then) future.  It would have been a sad death of a royal child in an age where dying in childhood was not uncommon.  I'll provide a link to an article about the legend just in case anyone cares to read it.  https://www.spookyisles.com/2015/01/bram-stoker-and-the-legend-of-the-bisley-boy/

I don't want to go off on a tangent on the power of myth thread.  The Lieutenant Kije (pronounced Keejay) story could be seen as an equivalent to a modern "urban legend".*  It's a well known tale of course - from Wikipedia "“The first appearance of the anecdote is in Vladimir Dahl's "Stories of the time of Paul I" (Russian: Рассказы о временах Павла I), a short piece published in the journal Russkaya Starina in 1870; he reported it as told by his father, Jochan Christian von Dahl (1764-1821). In this original version, a clerk miswrites an order promoting several ensigns (praporshchiki) to second lieutenants (podporuchiki): instead of "praporshchiki zh ... - v podporuchiki" ("as to Ensigns (names), [they are promoted to] Second Lieutenants"), he writes "praporshchik Kizh, ... - v podporuchiki" ("Ensign Kizh, (other names) [are promoted to] Second Lieutenants"). The Emperor Paul decides to promote the nonexistent Kizh to first lieutenant (poruchik); he quickly rises through the ranks to staff captain and full captain, and when he is promoted to colonel the emperor commands that Kizh appear before him. Of course no Kizh can be found; the military bureaucrats go through the paper trail and discover the original mistake, but they decide to tell the emperor that Kizh has died. "What a pity," the emperor says, "he was a good officer."  “

This was originally part of my post above but it appeared as black on brown - therefore illegible so I'm adding the second part of my original post separately.

            Wikipedia mentions the embellishment of the tale and a (satirical) play being written and a film made on the subject.  Posterity did at least benefit (if one likes said composer's music) from Sergei Prokofiev's musical score on the topic.
 
 
* People probably know this but just in case anyone from overseas is puzzled an urban legend is a tall tale which grows in the telling.  One is the story of somebody having a friend who was on holiday motoring around continental Europe with his/her husband/wife, children and a grandparent.  The grandparent sadly dies and not knowing what to do the family wrap granny/grandpa up and leave her/him on top of the car/motorhome while they go to inform the authorities of a sudden death.  While they are away an opportunist thief steals the car/motorhome along with granny/grandpa.
 
 
I'll confess I thought that was true when I first heard it (I was but a young thing at the time!!).  Of course when one thinks sensibly about it, the story doesn't seem credible.

Not so much a myth worth puncturing as me asking whether something is a myth or is in fact true.  I'd heard something to the effect that Henry VII was strictly speaking barred from inheriting the throne because the Beauforts were originally an illegitimate line (i.e. from John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford though they did marry later).  I was reading a website recently which said that the notion that the Beaufort line couldn't inherit the throne was in fact false.  Does anyone know whether the Beauforts were supposed to be prohibited from becoming sovereign (though I guess initially the chances of someone from that line inheriting looked pretty remote) or were they in fact in the line of succession though very far down.

I thought the illegitimate John Beaufort, 1st Marquess of Somerset, together with his illegitimate siblings - the children of John of Gaunt by his mistress Katherine Swynford - were all legitimized by Act of Parliament during the reign of Richard II and also at about the same time by the Pope himself. This made John Beaufort next in the line of succession to his father's titles after his father's legitimate children by his first two wives. However about a decade later, Beaufort's half-brother, Henry Bolingbroke, the legitimate son of John of Gaunt and now reigning as Henry IV, whilst confirming Beaufort's legitimacy, specifically barred him and his legitimized brothers from the throne. Their exact status was therefore uncertain - legitimate and successors to their father in all except the royal succession - and this lack of certainty subsequently led to much legal wrangling and ultimately to a lot of bloodshed in the following dynastic civil wars.

So yes, the Beauforts had been specifically barred from the succession by a decree of Henry IV, but the legality of this was disputed. Some 70 years later, despite all Henry Tudor's attempts to document his legal right to the throne - including suppressing the 1484 Titulus Regius Act which had declared the marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville invalid and accordingly made their eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, Henry VII's intended wife, illegitimate - he, Henry, was King as much by right of conquest as anything else.

Thanks MM.  I read Anya Seaton's novel Katheryn about John of Gaunt's sometime mistress later wife many years ago but can't remember it awfully well.  I didn't hate it as historical novels go but I didn't love it either and thought AS might have taken some artistic licence.  I am "on the fence" about whether Richard III was a good 'un or a bad 'un or a somewhere in between one but it's true that if things had played out differently and Richard III had died of old age in his bed, Henry probably wouldn't have been the first name on the lips of those seeking to appoint an heir to the throne.  His son Henry VIII was certainly harsh on some of the De la Poles.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

... if things had played out differently and Richard III had died of old age in his bed, Henry probably wouldn't have been the first name on the lips of those seeking to appoint an heir to the throne. 

Indeed, an aged Richard might still not have left a direct legitimate heir. His two eldest children, John and Katherine, were illegitimate, and his only legitimate son, Edward of Middleham, had died aged ten (March 1484). Richard's wife, Anne Neville, soon followed her son to the grave (April 1485) and she was followed by Richard himself just five months later (October 1485). After the death of her son, Anne Neville had effectively adopted her nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick, and Richard III had made the boy his heir presumptive, probably in deference to Anne Neville's wishes. But Edward of Warwick was later described as "simple-minded" at least in Tudor records, although this may well have been Tudor propaganda (Henry VII had him executed a few years after Bosworth). After Anne Neville died Richard had promptly named another nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as his heir presumptive - hence Henry VII's and Henry VIII's animosity to the de la Poles. So even if Richard had lived as king to a ripe old age, he may well not have remarried to produce another direct, male, heir, and thus he could well have bequeathed the nation just more dynastic wrangling.

Not exactly a myth but I didn't think this warranted its own separate thread.  I mentioned Adelard of Bath fleetingly in the Currently Reading thread in connection with the zero.  Wikepedia (or as some Res Historians have dubbed it Wikimisleadia) mentioned that "Given the period when he was alive, Adelard's biography is incomplete in places and leaves some aspects open to interpretation. As a result, much of what is ascribed to Adelard is a product of his own testimony."  So, is it to be taken with a grain of salt?  Did Adelard inflate his own worth?

LadyinRetirement wrote:

This is something I heard about a few years ago - a lady rang into a radio talk show and said it was something that used to go on but I've never been able to verify it or debunk it one way or the other.  The  story was that in the days before there was a National Health system and poor folk really could be in dire straits to try and afford health care, people would sometimes have all their teeth out as a preventative measure even if there teeth were good and then make do with dentures.  As I say in this case the internet has not been my friend so I just wondered if anybody had a clue about it.

 
 I think I can verify it LiR,

 My mother has told me about a couple of girls she was at school with who both got full dentures, for no medical reason, shortly after they left school.  This must have been in the early '50s so after the NHS started.  I think it's safe to assume that the practice would have been common earlier than this.
  Apparently they were both proud of their 'new' teeth.

 Mum's now 85 and proud she still has her originals.

Thank you for your reply to my query about false teeth which I typed some time ago, brenogler.  And well done to your Mum for retaining all her teeth throughout her life.

I had fallen for the tale that playing conkers was forbidden but seems that's not the case - though it must be discouraged in some places.  https://www.hse.gov.uk/myth/september.htm      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29519601

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Thank you for your reply to my query about false teeth which I typed some time ago, brenogler.  And well done to your Mum for retaining all her teeth throughout her life.

My late step-grandmother received a 21st birthday present, which she told me was a common gift a the time, of her parents paying for all her teeth to be removed, and dentures provided. Think her male relatives were all or nearly all steelworkers, so members of a number of health / dental / funeral clubs from work, for which they paid a small weekly contribution.

GG, thanks for adding to the information brenogler had given about the teeth extractions.  I've just realised that a few years ago when I made that post I wrote "there teeth"....oops.

The family I grew up with consisted of my father, my grandmother (his mother) and my great-uncle (my mother's uncle - she died when I was four and my father when I was sixteen and then we, my sister and I,  went to live with my uncle and aunt). My grandmother had false teeth which she carefully removed every night, my great-uncle had no teeth, and my father would never go to a dentist! I have always had wonderful teeth, and never, even at the age of 72, have fillings, which I put down to not liking sugary things, though I always had 3 teaspoons of sugar in my tea as a child. My sister's and other classmates' teeth were not so good. I still dreaded going to the dentist and would religiously clean my teeth three times a day for the few days before going to the dental nurse or dentist.  What good I thought that would do if I hadn't done it before that, I don't know.
But this has got away from the theme of mythology into the truthful account of present-day life.