October 2010
3 posts
Teeth-Pulling Unbelievably Prescribed to Virginia Woolf as Remedy →
thehydramag.com
I was reading Paris Press’s reissue of Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill when I discovered something completely mundane and mystifying: Virginia Woolf had had her teeth pulled because it was believed that “an infection of the teeth could somehow poison the brain.”
Hermione Lee writes in the intro of the Paris Press edition–
[Woolf’s] jumping pulse and high temperatures, which could last for weeks, were diagnosed as “influenza”; in 1923, the presence of “pneumonia microbes” was detected. At the beginning of 1922, these symptoms got so bad that she consulted a heart specialist who diagnosed a “tired heart” or heart murmur. Teeth pulling (unbelievably) was recommended as a cure for persistent high temperature–and also for ‘neurasthenia.’ (So the visit to the dentist in On Being Ill is not a change of subject.)
The passage in On Being Ill goes like this:
…what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentists’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us–
“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked : it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say : “But this is what I see; this is what I see”, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs Ramsay’s knee and say to her - but what could one say to her? “I’m in love with you?” No, that was not true. “I’m in love with this all”, waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children? It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant.”
—To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (via acandleandawick)
