The Smile

Another of the weird and wonderful treasures from the Southland Museum storeroom. You could leave me there for weeks. Just leave me some sandwiches at the door from time to time.

I've always been interested in dentistry and not only because I have been on the receiving end of copious quantities of it.

The museum even has one of the foot driven drills used by dental nurses during my childhood. They also have one of the later models that had small electric motors attached. Slow revving with blunt burs they were not for the fainthearted.

Last year I had my snaggled and broken top teeth replaced with implants. Here are the titanium posts were screwed into my top jaw. I was showing them off to everyone. No one was safe. I was stopping people in the street.

I regret that New Zealand doesn't have a dental museum. I visited on in London once. It had teeth very like these carved from hippopotamus bone, it had Roman dental instruments, it even had a reconstructed Victorian surgery. Yum.