Oral health is integral to wellbeing and quality of life. This important edited volume brings together leading scholars to address global oral health and the multiple ways in which theory, practice and discourse have shaped it in the modern period.
Structured around key themes, the book chapters draw on interdisciplinary perspectives in order to consider the role of the dental profession, the commercial sector, charities, the state, the media and patients in shaping oral health in the past and present. Collectively, the chapters consider the extent to which each of the studied groups and actors have sought to own and control the mouth. By adopting multiple perspectives, the book highlights the importance of cross-disciplinary work across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and provides a road map for a new interdisciplinary field focused on oral health and society.
Drawing on perspectives from dentistry, sociology, history and the wider humanities, this book will interest students and researchers of dentistry, public health, sociology of health and illness, the medical humanities and history.
1. Oral health: an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach?, Part I: Professionalism, ethics and inequalities, 2. Do dentists’ views on professionalism include moral inclusiveness?, 3. Designing healthy smiles, 4. Feminism, pipelines and gender myths: interrogating gender equality and inclusion in dentistry, Part II: Cultural representations of the mouth and teeth, 5. Toothy tales: dentures in the writings of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, 6. Metaphors in the mouth: on dental fitness and iatronormativity, 7. ‘DO AS YOUR DENTIST TELLS YOU’: mouthwash advertising in interwar America, 8. Science, beauty and health: the explosion of toothpaste advertising in interwar America, Part III: The patient’s perspective, 9. Tommy’s teeth: trench mouth, dentures and dental health among British army recruits in World War One, 10. The mouth as the gateway to the leaky body: the visibility of internal bleeding in the mouths of people with haemophilia, 11. ‘Having work done’: the teeth, mouth and oral health as a body project, Part IV: State, surveillance and social justice, 12. ‘Enlightened employers of labour’? Oral health in the British factory, 1890-1950, 13. The state of tooth decay: dental knowledge, medical policy and fluoridation in Sweden, 1952-62, 14. The cultural politics of dental humanitarianism
Claire L. Jones is Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Kent, UK Barry J. Gibson is Professor in Medical Sociology in the University of Sheffield’s School of Clinical Dentistry, UK.
