Note 17 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
Note 17. Page 281.
"Mayhem," saith Blackstone, "is a battery attended with this aggravating circumstance: that thereby the party injured is forever disabled from making so good a defence against future external injuries, as before he might have done. Among these defensive members are reckoned not only arms and legs, but a finger, an eye, and a fore-tooth; but the loss of one of the jaw-teeth, is no mayhem at common law, for they can be of no use in fighting."—3 Black. Comm. p. 121.