Teeth-Pulling Unbelievably Prescribed to Virginia Woolf as Remedy

Vanessa Bell. Original design for Hogarth Press dust jacket: graphite and watercolor, circa 1930.

I was reading Paris Press’s reissue of Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill when I discovered something completely mundane and mystifying: Virginia Woolf had had her teeth pulled because it was believed that “an infection of the teeth could somehow poison the brain.”

Hermione Lee writes in the intro of the Paris Press edition –

[Woolf's] jumping pulse and high temperatures, which could last for weeks, were diagnosed as “influenza”; in 1923, the presence of “pneumonia microbes” was detected. At the beginning of 1922, these symptoms got so bad that she consulted a heart specialist who diagnosed a “tired heart” or heart murmur. Teeth pulling (unbelievably) was recommended as a cure for persistent high temperature–and also for ‘neurasthenia.’ (So the visit to the dentist in On Being Ill is not a change of subject.)

The passage in On Being Ill goes like this:

…what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentists’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us–

Neurasthenia was sometimes called “Americanitis” because Americans were more prone to suffer from symptoms of stress and fatigue. The argument made by doctors (George Miller Beard), was that nervousness and tooth decay were unfortunate side-effects of civilization, and the only reason the teeth of civilized whites were in good working order was thanks to “the great skill of modern dentistry.” According to Beard, uncivilized people (“Indians and negroes”) had much less tooth decay and dental irregularities than white people; therefore, he concludes, if white “brain-working Americans” (seriously, this is his phrase) had tooth decay and non brain-working uncivilizeds didn’t, it must mean that tooth decay is like, almost a privilege or something. And since civilization will only lead to nervousness will only lead to tooth decay, why not just pull the teeth out as a prophylactic measure and prevent future trouble all togeths?

Dubious, hubristic medicine if you ask me.

More Hermione Lee on bed rest and inspiration