Medicine: Unspottable Teeth

An eagle-eye who can spot false teeth at a ten-yard glance is Boston Dentist Simon Myerson, brother of famed Harvard Psychiatrist Abraham Myerson. Every time gentle, absent-minded Dr. Myerson sees a mouthful of neat, dead-white false teeth, he shudders. Five years ago, Dr. Myerson was struck all of a heap. He called in his eldest son, Martin, a ceramist, and got busy.

Last week, at a dinner in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Dr. Myerson displayed to a gathering of top-flight U. S. dentists his new invention: transparent-tipped, natural-looking false teeth set in ruddy gums of a new plastic material. Exhibit A was a beaming colleague, fitted with a well-worn set of brownish, irregular teeth. “How becoming they are,” exclaimed Dr. Myerson, “to the rugged character time has produced in his face!” As one man, the dentists rose and applauded the teeth, applauded bold Dr. Myerson.

Principle of Dr. Myerson’s “True-Blend” teeth: the inner body of porcelain is made in one of ten different shades from cream to orange, matched to a patient’s original teeth, or to his complexion. Over this core, corresponding to the dentine of “natural teeth, Dr. Myerson slips a transparent grey enamel coat.

Dr. Myerson’s aim is to imitate, not improve on nature. So he often inserts little wedges of darker stained porcelain into the orange body, cuts ridges and erosions on the enamel coats, bleaches small patches, shadows imitation cavities, sets teeth crooked in their plastic plates. The new teeth are made in Dr. Myerson’s two Boston factories, sold to dentists all over the U. S. through regular dental supply houses. A plate takes eight days to make, costs little more than ordinary false teeth.