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all, Mew says, the face will be not only plain, but
in many cases so fl at as to look ‘‘melted.’’
Mew thought the origins of poor growth
could be found in the Industrial Revolution. The
rise of processed foods — beginning with the
invention of canning in the early 1800s — soft-
ened diets to the point that the masseter mus-
cles barely had to do any work when chewing.
Without the strain of the facial muscles work-
ing against the mandible and maxilla, children’s
bones no longer grew as thick as they once had.
And even more important, in Mew’s eyes, as
people moved into cramped, polluted cities,
they developed allergies that stuff ed their noses
and led them to breathe through their mouths,
which Mew believes distorted their jaws.
Mew felt the cure, then, must lay with a diet
of hard foods, and with the tongue, which he
says should sit at rest in the roof of the mouth,
acting as a kind of muscular scaff old for the
growing maxilla. If he could fi gure out a way
to get young patients to toughen up their diets
and keep their lips shut while they were still
growing, he thought he could cure malocclu-
sion without braces and put industrialized
faces on the right path of growth.
Throughout the 1970s, he tested his theo-
ries on his own children. His fi rst son, Bill, did
poorly — he suff ered from severe allergies and
had so much trouble keeping his mouth shut
that John resorted to hypnosis. Though Bill
disputes this, John says he created a headband
with a spike that poked his son’s chin anytime
he parted his lips. His third child, Rosie, was
put through an opposite experiment: Curious
about the eff ects of a soft diet on facial growth,
John instructed his wife to serve her puréed
foods in a bottle until she was 4 years old. (‘‘I had
teeth growing one in front of the other,’’ Rosie
told me. ‘‘I was a really, really ugly little kid.’’) It
was the middle child, Mike, who became John’s
orthotropic masterpiece, the ‘‘success’’ evident
as they sat side by side on the edge of the lake at
the castle: Where John’s face is thin and oblong,
Mike’s is wide and short, his chewing muscles
so large that you can see them fl ex.
In 1981, John published his theory in The
British Dental Journal, hoping to spur an ortho-
dontic revolution. But the response was frigid.
As he recounts in his unpublished memoir,
one reviewer simply wrote: ‘‘We might as well
discuss whether the moon is made of green
cheese.’’ Five years later, still indignant over
the article’s rejection, he detailed his ideas in
a self-published book, on the cover of which
he printed a gold-embossed Italian quotation:
‘‘Eppur si muove’’ — ‘‘and yet it moves,’’ the
defi ant words Galileo is said to have spoken
following his trial for heresy. He then gave up
traditional dentistry and committed himself toorthotropics full time. For the next 30 years, he treated a small
but loyal group of patients at his unassuming clinic in the south
London suburb of Purley — only stepping down in 2017, at age
89, when the General Dental Council took away his license.
John told me the revocation stemmed from a deliberately
provocative advertisement he had published, which accused
the orthodontic community of perpetrating ‘‘an illegal scam’’
on patients with their treatments. But he had also been accused
of failing to protect a patient’s personal information and of
malpractice, which I pointed out. A mother alleged, among
other things, that he pursued a treatment on her daughter after
she withdrew consent. John denies the allegation, blamingPhotograph by Levon Biss for The New York Times 25Opening pages: John Mew
inside Braylsham Castle, where
he lives, in Sussex, England.
Above: John’s son Mike Mew in
his orthotropics clinic in
the London suburb of Purley.