A 19th-century aid to looking a gift horse in the mouth, a grinning set of artificial teeth intended to help buyers establish the age and health of a horse, will be celebrated this week as one of the stars of Cambridge University’s Whipple Museum of the History of Science.
The teeth were made in France by Louis Auzoux, who began making papier-mache human medical models as teaching aids when corpses for dissection were scarce, and branched out into body parts of many other animals.
The Whipple’s set of teeth is now an extremely rare example of the sort sold in the 1840s for £10. The specially designed wooden case still has 29 of the original 31 pairs of jaws and their original labels, showing horses of different ages and condition, including examples of teeth filed down by dealers to disguise their true age, and teeth damaged by “crib biting”, caused by a bored, stressed or ill horse chewing at the timber of its stall.
They were originally commissioned from Auzoux to help the French cavalry regiments choose good horses, but were also used in training veterinary students.
Clare Wallace, collections manager at the Whipple, said visitors to the museum love the teeth: “Sometimes it looks as if they’re smiling at you, sometimes they’re slightly scary.”
The teeth also feature in H is for Horse, part of the university’s online alphabet of the animal connections in its many museums and collections.
The Museum of Classical Archaeology plaster casts include the procession of horses from the famous Parthenon frieze, taken in the 19th century from moulds after the much disputed Elgin marbles arrived at the British Museum. The Museum of Zoology has the skeleton of a famous British racehorse, Polymelus, given in the 1930s. The stallion went on to sire a string of further champions, a line still continuing through famous horses including Northern Dancer.
