Demon Dentist of Wrocław
'Polish dentist pulled out ALL boyfriend's teeth after he dumped her.' It's an irresistible headline, and one that caught the eye of every editor from Bulgaria to Botswana. In the week since the story appeared on the website of British tabloid the Daily Mail, it has been picked up by hundreds of news outlets ranging from CNN to Hollywoodgossip.com. There's just one small problem – it's completely untrue.
The 'story' claims that Wrocław dentist Anna Mackowiak extracted all of her ex-boyfriend's teeth when he turned up in her surgery a few days after their break-up complaining of toothache. The article even has a quote from the demon dentist: ‘I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions. 'But when I saw him lying there I just thought, "What a bastard".'
There's a roughly even split in the 166 comments under the Daily Mail article between those delighting in the revenge of a jilted woman and those suggesting she should be locked up for life. There aren't any comments questioning the story's veracity, which is a shame because the only truth it contains is that there is a city in Poland called Wrocław.
Journalists at Gazeta Wrocławska, surprised to find their hometown suddenly featured on every news portal around the world, quickly established that there is no dentist or medical practitioner of any kind called Anna Mackowiak working in the city. TVN24 also took the fairly obvious step of asking the police if anyone has recently been charged with large-scale tooth theft – they haven't.
Some of the details look suspicious as you re-read the article with the knowledge that it's a fairy tale. The phrase 'too good to be true' springs to mind when you discover that, not only is the victim, Marek Olszewski, doomed to a life of sipping czerwony barszcz through a straw, the article also claims that his new girlfriend has left him because "she can’t be with a man without teeth." I guess he'll see her again soon when she pops round to have him fix her brakes.
If this story is invented, why was it set in Poland? Are Daily Mail readers more likely to believe in a sadomasochistic dentist from Poland than from, say, Denmark? In short, should Poland be offended?
I think not. A British audience is more likely to believe in outrageous events taking place in Central Europe than in Scotland, but the citizens of Poland shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Brits believe them to be either terminally thick (Mr Olszewski) or irrationally hot blooded (Ms Mackowiak).
The Demon Dentist of Wrocław story is just another example of the age-old tendency to believe that foreigners, or people from a different strata of society, or neighbours do things that we would never dream of doing, and the irresistible desire to hear the details.
It’s like those stories about hilariously stupid criminals who phone the bank to check how much money is in the vault before coming round to rob it – they’re always from a small town in Kansas that nobody has ever been to and, consequently, where we can believe such things happen.
If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with a man I stabbed last year about some land he thinks I should invest in…
Jamie Stokes