In 1787 a wealthy industrialist bought a teenage girl's tooth to transplant into his daughter's mouth

historyWellcome Collection1787 · London, England

In 1787 a wealthy industrialist bought a teenage girl's tooth to transplant into his daughter's mouth

the gist

In 1787, Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton paid a London teenager a guinea for one of her incisors. His daughter Anne, who had already lost several molars, needed a replacement tooth to improve her marriage prospects. The operation took place at the surgery of Charles Dumergue, dentist to the royal family, and was part of a fashionable 18th-century trend in tooth transplants. Historian Paul Craddock uses the surviving letter, the only record of the girl, to examine class and the price of beauty. He argues that the trade reflected a society where poor people's bodies could be bought. The girl's name was never recorded, and she disappears from history.

so what

The tooth transplant trade exposed how wealth could buy appearance, and how the bodies of the poor were treated as a resource. It also reminds us that much of history's ordinary people are known only through the choices of those who could afford to write letters.

fun fact

Tooth transplants in the 18th century often involved teeth taken from living donors, and the practice faded after some recipients died of infections.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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