You are far richer than your grandparents ever were, assuming that we measure wealth in terabytes. If we instead measure wealth in inflation-adjusted dollars, well, we’re not going to make any assumptions. Some of our readers own jets, while others live under bridges.
Either way, people in the past sometimes had to deal with types of poverty that you never have to think about. You might wish you had a little more money than you do, but at least you don’t generally find yourselves facing the following levels of desperation.
Discard Teeth. Soup’s Cheap!
From the 18th century, all the way to the early 20th century, people found various reasons for yanking out all their perfectly healthy teeth. “Leave them in,” some people figured, “and they’ll just ache sooner or later. So we might as well pull them all out in one go!” Or, there was the convincing theory that removing all your teeth was a good way to prevent madness. Removing the spleen or colon might be sensible next steps.
Whatever the motive, after someone removed their teeth, the normal course would be to get dentures. But not everyone went that route. In 1928, a man from Chicago named Mathias Blau got his wife to have all her teeth removed and then refused to buy her dentures. He argued that life without teeth would save lots of money, since he could feed her soup from now on.
Campbell’s
This logic was not totally sound. If it’s possible to live on soup, his wife could do so just as easily with dentures as without them. As it was, she took him to court, where a judge called Blau’s actions “the meanest trick.” The judge ruled that Blau had to buy his wife two sets of dentures, and provide her with at least one steak every week.
