The Fear of False Teeth

Now that our nation is at war again, we are confronted with the certainty that many men will most unfortunately come home from the fighting fronts in a maimed condition. Some will lack a finger, and eye, a hand, an arm or a foot, and still others may have their teeth knocked out. Soldiers and sailors, and aviators too, will return to civilian life in an imperfect condition; for in many instances some portion of their bodies will have been “split off,” as it were, on the battlefield or on the operating table. The body will be in two parts, in a way of thinking, and the main portion will be less than a perfect whole, while the split off fragment will have found its grave in which to decay.

In the course of months and years it will be discovered that a certain portion of these maimed men, especially if they meet with severe reverses and rebuffs in trying to adjust themselves to civilian life, will develop nervous troubles, schizophrenia particularly. The personality will split even as the body will have already split off in flakes, as it were a flint stone under the pressure awl of an untutored man making arrow-heads. There will be those who will brood over their fates and who will try to relate their accidents to some boyhood deed that occasioned shame, feeling as if some divine punishment were relentlessly pursuing them. Such unfortunates will perhaps be more religiously minded than many others who will have no nervous breakdown. During periods of unemployment, or while in a sanatorium for a long period, the remorseful cripple cannot but review his life's career, penetratingly and often in a spirit of self-criticism.

Those men who cannot be active in the world's affairs, because of the loss of some body part, will travel back over their life's path in regretful reminiscences, and some will gradually gain the conviction that they have themselves barred the pathway of their own soul's journey to the haven of final bliss wherein only the perfect souls may enter. Some port