False teeth have been considered necessaries for a wife. One Andrews had a conversation with Gilman, a dentist, as to the latter furnishing the former’s wife with a plate of mineral teeth, and he agreed to pay for certain other dental services rendered to Mrs. A. The plate was furnished while Mr. and Mrs. A. were living together, and it was quite suitable to the former’s circumstances and station in life; he saw it, knew whence it came, raised no objection to it, still he declined to pay for it. The Court, however, held him liable, not only because the wife being permitted to retain the plate, and the other circumstances, showed her authority to make the purchase, but also on the ground that the teeth were some of those necessaries wherewith a husband is bound to furnish his wife [454]. A dentist must not take any unfair advantage of his patient. Some thirty years ago, one Captain Simpson, a very old seaman and a pensioner in Greenwich Hospital, gave a bill of exchange, payable eight months after date, for £262 10s. to one Davis, a London dentist, purporting to be for value received. Davis said, the real bargain was that he should during the whole of the Captain’s life attend to his teeth, and supply him with new ones from time to time. He also said that a new set of teeth would cost from £30 to £50. The bill was in the handwriting of D.; it was given in his house when no third person was by, and it was never heard of until after the captain’s death, which took place before it was due. There was no writing as to the teeth. The executors of Simpson declined to pay, whereupon Davis handed the note over to a creditor of his own, |172| who sued both parties. The executors filed a bill in chancery, impeaching the document for fraud, and asking that it might be delivered up to them. The Court thought that it was quite impossible for any reasonable being to draw any inference from the materials before it, but that it was a case of fraud—nay, a gross fraud, and the decree was made as asked [455]. Sir Launcelot Shadwell thought that the case had points of resemblance to that of _Dent_ v. _Bennett_ [456], in which a medical man bargained for a very large sum of money to attend a person of advanced years until death; but in that case the doctor had to attend to the whole human body, not merely to a particular part of it.