The case of the missing false teeth
In 1902, a man in Ohio paid the ultimate price for losing his dentures
Welcome to The Quack Doctor, a weekly publication that unearths stories from medicine’s past. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Frank Buettner woke up at four o’clock in the morning with a raging sore throat. It felt as though something was choking him. He coughed violently, trying to clear the horrible sensation, but the pain became too much.
Alone in his dark bedroom, with his wife away visiting friends, he feared that something was terribly wrong. Then he realised that the lower half of his false teeth had disappeared, and the idea immediately flashed through his mind that he had swallowed them. Putting his fingers down his throat as far as he dared, he believed he could feel the edge of the denture plate.
For Mr Buettner, this scenario wasn’t too far-fetched. A few years previously, he had experienced a similar incident, which culminated in successful recovery of the teeth. For some reason he had not been deterred from keeping them in at night, and now it seemed they were chomping their way towards his stomach once again.
This time, however, the outcome would prove far more serious.
Buettner, a successful 61-year-old businessman who lived in Cleveland, OH, rushed to the nearby home of his physician, Dr Joseph Kofron. Between them, they tried for two hours to retrieve the teeth – including by the use of a piece of wire – or to break them up so he could fully swallow them.
Buettner’s daughter, Clara Dillhoefer, later remembered:
Father came back home about 7am. I met him at the door. He was exhausted and his face was purple. He was still holding his throat. He gasped the one word ‘Hospital.’ That was all he could say.1
Mrs Dillhoefer went with him to St Alexis’ Hospital. (He happened to be the voluntary treasurer there, and his generosity had contributed to building and maintaining the institution.) Meanwhile, the rest of the family searched the house in case the gnashers turned up, but they remained AWOL. Buettner’s wife Caroline got a message to come home from her friends in Pittsburgh straight away.
At the hospital, Dr George W Crile recognised the perfect opportunity to use a relatively new diagnostic tool – the Engeln x-ray machine, developed by Cleveland physician Dr George S Iddings. The x-ray plate showed a dark shadow in Buettner’s oesophagus, near his stomach. It was too far down to be fished out via the mouth, so Dr Crile and his colleagues decided to operate. They spent two hours opening the length of the oesophagus and inspecting every inch of it for any sign of the denture.
One of the people back at the house was Tillie Dillhoefer, sister of Buettner’s son-in-law. She found it hard to believe that it could be physically possible for someone to swallow a set of teeth, and spent some time calmly searching the bedroom that the anxious family had already ransacked. And there it was – the denture plate, grinning innocently on the floor next to the bed.
The surgeons had got as far as they could with the oesophagus and were thinking of proceeding to a gastrotomy when Miss Dillhoefer brought the runaway teeth to the hospital.
But poor Mr Buettner was in a dangerous condition, and his teeth arrived too late. He did not regain consciousness, and died thirteen hours later on 9 October 1902. In a paper subsequently read before an audience of Cleveland’s physicians and surgeons, Dr Crile justified the decision to operate by saying that all the evidence at the time had pointed towards the teeth really being in Buettner’s body, not least the fact that Buettner himself – ‘a man whose word was thoroughly reliable’2 – believed them to be there. He concluded that Buettner had started to swallow the denture in his sleep but coughed it up before properly awakening. The apparent mass on the x-ray was probably a shadow of the patient’s heart.
It was a sad end to an interesting life. Born in Oppenheim, Germany, in 1841, Frank Buettner arrived in the US as a 10-year-old orphan and spent his teens hustling to make his own way. He worked in the meat trade for many years, later setting up his business partnership, Brennan and Buettner, for the contract supply of paving. By the time of the teeth incident in 1902, he lived a comfortable life surrounded by loving children and grandchildren, including two teenagers he and his wife had adopted when their father went to prison. He had served as a city councillor, was a prominent member of Cleveland’s German Catholic community, and was known for his generous philanthropy.
The story of the missing false teeth might have its ridiculous elements, but the needless death of a healthy 61-year-old shows how quickly and strangely a freak situation can rob a person of life, and a family of their loved one.
If today is going OK for you, enjoy it – you never know when disaster is around the next corner, ready to bare its teeth.
Mummy juice, tapeworm fishing and satanic liniment
I had fun talking to Kristin Gourlay of Magic Silver Bullet recently about some of my favourite strange and gruesome stories from medicine’s history. You can listen to our conversation or read the transcipt on Kristin’s Substack.
Magic Silver Bullet is all about humanity’s search for the perfect cure, so I’m sure readers of The Quack Doctor will be keen to subscribe!
London Month of the Dead
On 27 October at 3.30pm I’ll be speaking at Guy’s Hospital Chapel on DISSECTION AND DISSIPATION: Life as a Medical Student in Victorian London.
As the 19th-century medical profession became increasingly regulated, medical schools tried to leave behind the stereotype of the dissolute, drunken student messing about in the dissecting room. But the image refused to die, and tales abounded of students duelling with severed limbs, tormenting the public with pranks and stumbling down the steps of the Cider Cellars. I’ll be telling some stories of what medical students got up to, and how they prepared for a daunting future of holding people’s lives in their hands.
Tickets are £12 - book here, and take a look at London Month of the Dead’s full programme of events here.
‘A Useless Operation,’ The Waco Times-Herald Sun, 12 October 1902.
‘Read paper on missing teeth,’ The Cleveland Plain Dealer, 8 November 1902.