Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, sat patiently while the court dentist probed her tender gums, feeling for the decayed tooth that had been hurting her for the past several days. Her labor pains had begun earlier that afternoon, and it had occurred to her that, as long as she was going to be in labor, she might as well undergo the agony of having the tooth extracted at the same time. So she sat in stoic silence as the dentist completed his examination, gripped the aching tooth with his cruel instruments and, with a practiced twist of his wrist, wrenched it out of her mouth. Combining childbirth with dentistry was painfiil, but efficient—and Maria Theresa was a ruler of exemplary efficiency. Besides, as she had good reason to know, having given birth fourteen times before, nothing happened in the early hours of labor. She was not in the habit of wasting time. So, having recovered from the shock of the extraction, and with rolls of cloth in her mouth to absorb the bleeding, she called for her papers and sat for the next several hours reading and signing official documents, clutching her abdomen every now and again when the spasms became acute.
