Telltale Teeth

On file at the Department of Justice in Washington are the fingerprints, photographs, aliases and nicknames of 7,052,061 U. S. malefactors. Surest of these four keys to the identity of criminals are fingerprints which differ even in identical twins, but even fingerprints are not foolproof. The late John Dillinger had a plastic surgeon mutilate his fingertips with acid but failed to obliterate their prints because the job was poorly done (TIME, Dec. 16, 1935). The finger prints of another recent murderer, John Hamilton, proved useless to police who found his body a year after his death. Identification of Hamilton was effected because his teeth, most durable part of the human body, were still in his head and because he had been to a dentist who had preserved a chart of his mouth.

Last week a onetime president of the Chicago Dental Society, alert & articulate Dr. Edward James Ryan, offered Hamilton and the children who were burned beyond recognition by the New London, Texas school explosion as cogent reasons for adding charts of every U. S. mouth to the Department of Justice's files. Such charts might valuably supplement the Department's four means of identifying criminals, prove even more useful as a means of identifying unknown corpses.

Dr. Ryan, 38, is editor of a highly profitable 136-page magazine called Oral Hygiene, sent free to 68,000 dentists each month* and of a 58-page monthly called Dental Digest to which 22,000 dentists subscribe. Instead of using his own magazines to present his Plan, and thus risk offending the profession, Dr. Ryan used the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, issued last week. To implement his Plan he required a chart of the human mouth which all dentists in the U. S. might understand. None of the 38 dental schools of this country had such a chart. So Dr. Ryan designed his own. On a grey background the 32 teeth are shown 1) as they look from the front, with their roots outlined, 2) as they look from the inside of the mouth. On that design dentist or layman may clearly mark every peculiarity, filling, inlay, pivot tooth, bridge or plate in every mouth. Lest one human peculiarity escape attention of dental identificationists, Dr. Ryan pointed out that the shape of the face, roof of the mouth and the two upper front teeth usually correspond. A squarefaced man will have square upper front teeth, square mouth roof.

Mouth habits leave permanent and identifiable marks on the teeth, observed Dr. Ryan. He listed some--Nervous habits: toothpick biting, fingernail biting, grinding teeth, clenching the jaws in sleep, thrusting the tongue against the teeth, lip biting, biting on the ear pieces of eyeglasses, biting paperclips, pencils, fountain pens; Occupational habits: thread-biting in sewing, pin-&-needle habit (dressmakers), holding nails in teeth, biting the tips of cigars, clarinet and tuba playing, holding cord between teeth; Miscellaneous habits which mark teeth characteristically include: pipe smoking, using.cigaret holder, chewing cigars, opening tops of bottles with teeth, cracking nuts, chewing bones (Dr. Ryan fondly gnaws the meat out of lobster shells), mouth breathing, thumb sucking, orange sucking.

*A profitable competitor also sent free to dentists each month is Dental Survey, edited by Dr. Elmer Best.

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