The Discovery
In 1593, people started talking about a boy named
Christoph Müller who had a golden tooth. A professor of medicine named Jakob
Horst decided to investigate. He found out that the boy really did have a gold
tooth in his mouth. Horst tested the gold and found out that it was real, but
not as good as Hungarian gold.
The Explanation
Horst wrote a book about the case called "Of the
Golden Tooth of the Boy from Silesia". He thought that the boy's tooth
turned to gold because of the planets' alignment when he was born. Horst
believed that the golden tooth was a sign of good things to come for the Holy
Roman Empire. However, because the tooth was on the boy's left side, which was
considered the bad side, Horst thought that there would be some bad things that
would happen first.
In the year 1593, there was a
report that the teeth of a child of Silesia of seven years old dropped out, and
that one of gold came in the place of one of his great teeth. Horatius, a
professor of physic in the university of Helmstad, wrote in the year 1595, the
history of this tooth, and pretended that it was partly natural, and partly
miraculous, and that it was sent from God to this child, to comfort the
Christians who were then afflicted by the Turks.
The Debate
Not everyone agreed with Horst. A Scottish doctor named
Duncan Liddell thought that the tooth was man-made. He wrote his own book
called "Tractatus de dente aureo pueri Silesiani". Time proved
Liddell right. The gold on the tooth was just a thin layer that someone had put
on the boy's tooth.
The Truth
The boy tried to hide the truth by not letting anyone
else look at his tooth. But one day, a drunk man got angry and stabbed the boy
in the cheek. When a doctor came to help the boy, he found out that the tooth
was fake. Christoph was put in jail, and the person who put the gold on his
tooth ran away. Even though the tooth was fake, it is still important in the
history of dentistry. It was the first time that someone made a gold crown for
a tooth.
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