For the past 50 years, he has championed an unorthodox cure, based on a theory about the cause and treatment of crooked teeth, which he calls “orthotropics.” If correct, Mew’s theory would upend many of the fundamental beliefs of mainstream orthodontic practice. “Why do crooked things look better?”īut if crookedness lends a castle its beauty, it does the opposite to a face - and nothing concerns Mew more than the proliferation of ugly faces, which he considers a modern epidemic. “It’s all part of the ambience,” he told me, grinning. He pointed out to me that the earliest carvings tended to have lopsided faces while the latter ones did not, as he’d refined his technique on the fly. In a dining room he called the Great Hall, grotesques protruded from oak beams near the ceiling - all of them carved by Mew himself. Walking through the home, which he built in the 1990s, we passed by a medieval drawing room with intentionally slanted walls and climbed staircases in a turret, whose stone steps Mew had sanded down unevenly in hopes of lending them the appearance of age. When I visited him there last March, he ushered me across a reedy moat and into the kitchen. He lives alone in a castle of his own making, which sits upon a man-made lake in a secluded forest in southeast England. In his youth, Mew navigated the British Isles as a competitive sailor, raced Formula One cars and modeled period costumes for the BBC now he walks with a cane, but he’s still vigorous.
Atop his head he wears a yellowing toupee, its presence betrayed by a fringe of talcum-white hair poking out at his ears. His face is long and narrow his hazel eyes rest in deep sockets. John Mew is a 91-year-old orthodontist from the United Kingdom.
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