Oral history: How Americans got their straight, white teeth

Americans are famous the world over for their straight, white teeth. In this dissertation, I explore the sociohistorical factors that resulted in the distinctive appearance of our teeth. This work is in large part a history of the dental profession, since dentists played the largest, and most proximate, role in making our teeth look the way they do. As a history of the dental profession, this dissertation seeks to show how dentists successfully gained and maintained authority over the theories and practices related to caring for the mouth and teeth, even when those theories were at odds with contemporary medical thinking. In an era of constitutional medicine, dentists successfully promulgated highly localized theories of disease and the local, in situ treatments that those theories supported. Later, as medicine became more local and specific in its theories and treatments, dentists successfully attached the idea of dental disease to system-wide bodily consequences. Later still, in fluoride, dentists acquired a powerful touchstone for reaching the general public, children especially, and for raising social expectations about the health and appearance of our mouths. Though dentists play the largest role in this work, many other groups played a part in making our teeth look the way they do, including water works engineers, whose failure to act decisively in the water fluoridation issue led, I argue, to their reduced role in public health activities; child health advocates; toothpaste manufacturers; and even anthropologists and fine artists. A work of social history, this dissertation connects the actions of groups and individuals involved in the story to larger sociohistorical currents, such as race fears, the changing social value of children, and the growth of professional expertise, that shaped these American ideas and beliefs in the period my study covers