Dragon's Teeth, 1891.

Here's what looks like a precursor to the novelty mouth-shaped toilet, from The Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology of the Human Teeth, 1854.

This vintage Colgate ad (from 1873) reminds us that we know our own teeth only through the looking glass!

Ghost teeth (what Goethe called Geisterzahn) are neutral entities, neither quite divine nor satanic, equally good and bad.  "Their realm may be beyond human rationality, but it is not inaccessible to human experience.  [Ghost teeth] have their home in the imagination.  Neither concrete, i.e. empirically verifiable, nor rational, they inhabit the above and below of human rationality.  They are a concrete experience of the non-concrete in the mind, an imaginary concretisation of extra-rational phantoms" (Maike Oergel, Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770-1815, 2006, p. 241).

We wrote a macabre tale about ghost teeth, and it appears in the Spooky Tales ebook.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Ask any person to tell you what missing teeth are — "real," everyday missing teeth, not the abstract extractions of theoretical dentistry — and he will likely elaborate upon abscessed absences, silver-filled nonentities, cavitied nothingnesses, fairy chattel.  How can it be that a baby's toothless smile is contagious?  Can a toothless smiler be preoccupied?

[Apologies to philosopher Roberto Casati.]

Dedicated to Gary Barwin.

A "Dream of the Dentist's Chair," from the Aug. 8, 1891 issue of Punch.