Toothbrushing has been a daily a part of most individuals’s day by day routines because the mid-Twentieth century, but it surely was only some a long time earlier that the British state first started to impress upon the general public the significance of sustaining good dental hygiene.
Two conflicts highlighted the necessity for state intervention. Each the Second Boer Warfare and the First World Warfare uncovered the extent of poor dental well being amongst military recruits and, by extension, the broader British inhabitants. Through the Second Boer Warfare roughly 2,000 troopers had been evacuated again to Britain and an additional 5,000 classed as unfit for obligation within the area as a consequence of decayed enamel. In response, the Inter-departmental Committee on Bodily Deterioration was arrange in 1903 to analyze the state of the troops’ well being. The ensuing report advisable quite a lot of welfare interventions meant to enhance the well being and wellbeing of the nation, amongst which was the suggestion to the Board of Schooling that the care of enamel needs to be taught in faculties. Colleges had been additionally to implement day by day enamel cleansing, in addition to systematic inspection and therapy of youngsters’s enamel by dentists. Regardless of this, unhealthy enamel amongst military recruits persevered. Through the first yr of the First World Warfare one of many main causes of hospitalisation was dental illness.
Within the ensuing years, additional committees and organisations had been based to advertise dental well being and schooling. In 1923 the Dental Board – an offshoot of the Basic Medical Council – arrange the Dental Well being Propaganda Committee, which was to supervise a brand new programme of dental well being schooling in Britain. Then, in 1927, the Central Council for Well being Schooling was established, supplying personnel, tools and academic supplies to native authorities to help them of their work in spreading public well being messaging, together with info on how one may finest care for one’s enamel.
Dental propaganda produced within the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties framed unhealthy enamel as not solely detrimental to well being, but additionally as one thing that might influence one’s social life and financial prospects. Youngsters and moms had been usually focused by this messaging, to encourage them to implement modifications at residence. Movies, exhibitions, posters and different materials warned kids of grim futures if they didn’t care for their enamel by means of day by day brushing, avoiding sugary meals and thru common dental train, akin to chewing laborious meals. A 1936 movie Watch out for the Demons, for instance, adopted the lives of two siblings, Elsie, who listens to her mom and brushes her enamel each evening, and Jack, who all the time forgets to brush his enamel and eats candy biscuits at bedtime. Later in life Elsie is profitable, however Jack has bitter regrets:
Though vibrant and clever, employers won’t take him due to his unhealthy enamel and look …Elsie[’s] successful smile and beauty convey her success …not solely in enterprise does her smile assist, for she wins the center of a younger man.
This propaganda was prolonged to the office. Posters produced by the Dental Board pressured the financial significance of dental well being. One, produced within the Twenties, confirmed a employee subsequent to the turning cogwheels of business equipment:
If the enamel are in unhealthy situation the wheels received’t work effectively – it’s the similar along with your enamel. Maintain your enamel and your enamel will care for you!
These messages had been disseminated in all kinds of codecs to succeed in the most important doable viewers. Native cinemas screened movies on the care of enamel – akin to ‘A Brush with the Enemy’, or ‘Smile If You Dare!’ – arranging particular matinees for schoolchildren. Comparable movies had been additionally proven totally free on native councils’ premises, with some even taking the cinema to the road utilizing cinema vans. Bermondsey council, for instance, organised screenings on the streets of the borough within the Twenties. Posters advising on tooth care appeared on electrical avenue indicators, the London Underground and at main railway stations throughout the nation, and dental well being maxims had been printed on London, Midland and Scottish railway tickets.
Councils throughout the nation additionally placed on ‘Well being Weeks’, exhibitions geared toward educating native communities. Because the Medical Officer of Well being for Deptford, Charles S. Thomson, said in 1925, the target of a Well being Week was:
to show each householder to be his personal Medical Officer of Well being. Public Well being ought to start at residence and never on the City Corridor … It should be inborn upon the citizen that to a really giant extent illness is preventable, and it rests with him, and never with the opposite man, to see that it’s prevented.
Stressing private accountability was obligatory: skilled dental care was inaccessible to many as a consequence of price. The state’s promotion of tooth care as an space of self-care was, subsequently, extra sensible – and cost-effective – than advocating for skilled intervention.
The introduction of NHS dentistry in 1948 meant that every one British residents had entry to free skilled dental therapy for the primary time. The state now had larger accountability for making certain the well being and care of the nation’s enamel. Nonetheless, fees for NHS dental therapy had been launched in 1951 and stay in place right this moment.
Dental care is, for most individuals, now a part of their on a regular basis well being rituals. To an extent the state’s dental well being campaigning all through the Twentieth century has been a hit. Nonetheless, the rising inaccessibility of NHS dentistry has led to a dental disaster and the rise of ‘DIY’ dentistry. Information experiences have included tales of individuals making their very own dentures out of resin and superglue, or utilizing pliers to extract their very own enamel. In 2024 the British Dental Affiliation discovered that 80 per cent of dentists had handled a affected person who had carried out dentistry on themselves since lockdown. Whereas tooth care stays a person accountability, the state stays vital in making certain that these crises and inequalities don’t trigger enamel to, as soon as once more, grow to be a nationwide well being concern.
Georgia Haire is a Postdoctoral Analysis Fellow at Vancouver Island College.
