Making the American Mouth : : Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century / / Alyssa Picard.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Rutgers University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Picard, Alyssa,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (242 p.) :; 9

Why are Americans so uniquely obsessed with teeth? Brilliantly white, straight teeth? Making the American Mouth is at once a history of United States dentistry and a study of a billion-dollar industry. Alyssa Picard chronicles the forces that limited Americans' access to dental care in the early twentieth century and the ways dentists worked to expand that access--and improve the public image of their profession. Comprehensive in scope, this work describes how dentists' early public health commitments withered under the strain of fights over fluoride, mid-century social movements for racial and gender equity, and pressure to insure dental costs. It explains how dentists came to promote cosmetic services, and why Americans were so eager to purchase them. As we move into the twentyfirst century, dentists' success in shaping their industry means that for many, the perfect American smile will remain a distant--though tantalizing--dream.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. American Dental Hygiene: "Small Flags Attached to Toothbrushes May Be Waved" -- Chapter 2. Diet and the Dental Critique of American Life: "We Boast of Our Civilization, But We Starve Our Children" -- Chapter 3. "Like a Sugar-Coated Pill": Defining American Dentistry Abroad -- Chapter 4. "This National Stupidity": American Dental Economics in the 1930s and 1940s -- Chapter 5. Behind the Fluorine Curtain -- Chapter 6. The "Satisfaction of Dentistry" and the End of Public Health -- Chapter 7. The Look of the American Mouth -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index