Doctor Tushmaker was never regularly bred as a physician or surgeon,
but he possessed naturally a strong mechanical genius and a fine
appetite; and finding his teeth of great service in gratifying the
latter propensity, he concluded that he could do more good in the
world, and create more real happiness therein, by putting the teeth
of its inhabitants in good order than in any other way; so Tushmaker
became a dentist. He was the man who first invented the method of
placing small cog-wheels in the back teeth for the more perfect
mastication of food, and he claimed to be the original discoverer of
that method of filling cavities with a kind of putty which, becoming
hard directly, causes the tooth to ache so grievously that it has to be
pulled, thereby giving the dentist two successive fees for the same job.
Tushmaker was one day seated in his office, in the city of Boston,
Massachusetts, when a stout old fellow named Byles presented himself to
have a back tooth drawn. The dentist seated his patient in the chair of
torture, and, opening his mouth, discovered there an enormous tooth,
on the right-hand side, about as large, as he afterward expressed it,
"as a small Polyglot Bible."
"I shall have trouble with this tooth," thought Tushmaker, but he
clapped on his heaviest forceps and pulled. It didn't come. Then he
tried the turn-screw, exerting his utmost strength, but the tooth
wouldn't stir. "Go away from here," said Tushmaker to Byles, "and
return in a week, and I'll draw that tooth for you or know the reason
why." Byles got up, clapped a handkerchief to his jaw, and put
forth. Then the dentist went to work, and in three days he invented
an instrument which he was confident would pull anything. It was a
combination of the lever, pulley, wheel and axle, inclined plane,
wedge and screw. The castings were made, and the machine put up in the
office, over an iron chair rendered perfectly stationary by iron rods
going down into the foundations of the granite building. In a week
old Byles returned; he was clamped into the iron chair, the forceps
connected with the machine attached firmly to the tooth, and Tushmaker,
stationing himself in the rear, took hold of a lever four feet in
length. He turned it slightly. Old Byles gave a groan and lifted his
right leg. Another turn, another groan, and up went the leg again.
"What do you raise your leg for?" asked the Doctor.
"I can't help it," said the patient.
"Well," rejoined Tushmaker, "that tooth is bound to come out now."
He turned the lever clear round with a sudden jerk, and snapped old
Byles's head clean and clear from his shoulders, leaving a space of
four inches between the severed parts!
They had a _post-mortem_ examination--the roots of the tooth were found
extending down the right side, through the right leg, and turning up in
two prongs under the sole of the right foot!
"No wonder," said Tushmaker, "he raised his right leg."
The jury thought so, too, but they found the roots much decayed; and
five surgeons swearing that mortification would have ensued in a few
months, Tushmaker was cleared on a verdict of "justifiable homicide."
He was a little shy of that instrument for some time afterward; but one
day an old lady, feeble and flaccid, came in to have a tooth drawn, and
thinking it would come out very easy, Tushmaker concluded, just by way
of variety, to try the machine. He did so, and at the first turn drew
the old lady's skeleton completely and entirely from her body, leaving
her a mass of quivering jelly in her chair! Tushmaker took her home in
a pillow-case.
The woman lived seven years after that, and they called her the
"India-Rubber Woman." She had suffered terribly with the rheumatism,
but after this occurrence never had a pain in her bones. The dentist
kept them in a glass case. After this, the machine was sold to the
contractor of the Boston Custom-House, and it was found that a child
of three years of age could, by a single turn of the screw, raise a
stone weighing twenty-three tons. Smaller ones were made on the same
principle and sold to the keepers of hotels and restaurants. They were
used for boning turkeys. There is no moral to this story whatever,
and it is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly
exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main
incidents.
* * * * *
Bob Ingersoll relates an anecdote of a Hebrew who went into a
restaurant to get his dinner. The devil of temptation whispered in his
ear, "Bacon." He knew if there was anything that made Jehovah real
white mad, it was to see anybody eating bacon; but he thought, "Maybe
He is too busy watching sparrows and counting hairs to notice me," and
so he took a slice. The weather was delightful when he went into the
restaurant, but when he came out the sky was overcast, the lightning
leaped from cloud to cloud, the earth trembled, and it was dark. He
went back into the restaurant, trembling with fear, and, leaning over
the counter, said to the clerk, "My God, did you ever hear such a fuss
about a little piece of bacon!"