Amputation

     I was telling you about my Aunt Myrtle. She had false teeth same as father, but whereas his fitted him like the paper on the wall, hers didn't, and she had to get another set, which left her with the first lot on her hands. She never liked wasting anything, but she couldn't think what to do with them. Why she didn't pawn them and give the proceeds to the West Africans, I don't know, but apparently it didn't occur to her.
     The idea she got after a lot of thought was to make them the basis, if you know what the word means, of a mousetrap. She got a scientific feller she knew to fix one up with the teeth inside it in such a way that any mouse that shoved its nose in would get its loaf of bread snapped off, and all would have been well if she hadn't gone into the kitchen in the dark one night with no shoes on and tripped over the trap, which promptly came down like a ton of bricks on her big toe, nearly severing it. And the doctors at the hospital decided to amputate in case gangrene might set in.
     And as the teeth were legally hers, the result that she became the only woman in East Dulwich, where she was living at the time, who could truthfully say that she had bitten her own toe off. It gave her prestige.

(from The Girl In Blue, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)