How common was it in the past for young people to have dentures?

Factual Questions
21

Grandpa was born in 1910. When he got his first cavity (I assume he knew it was there because it was hurting), he asked his dentist to pull all of his teeth. The dentist refused and talked him into only pulling his molars, explaining that it was usually the molars that went bad and that leaving the incisors & cuspids would make it easier to fit the dentures tightly.

Grandma didn’t talk about her dentures, so I don’t know that story. But they both considered Grandpa’s dentures to be getting ahead of the inevitable.

22

I just took a look at some analyses of archaeological analyses of large data sets of late 19th-early 20th century burial exhumations in the UK and US. None of them were particularly considering this issue so have to summarise from a quick skim:

  • dentures remaining in the crania were common from 1880s
  • their timing reasonably coincides with the use of vulcanite - which made for expedient, reasonably well-fitting and durable dentures
  • full tooth row denture sets seem to be as common as partials.

When teeth are removed the bone resorbs and the tooth socket fills in. This makes it hard for the dental anthropologists and pathologists to say whether a toothless lower jaw, for example, was all removed at once or over many extractions. They do point out in some instances to abnormally low wear and displacement on the opposing teeth, as these would have had nothing to really work against much of the time, and that this suggests systematic removal of the entire row having been carried out.

There is also an interesting side excursion into the history of dentistry and dental prosthetic manufacture. Dental technicians were more numerous than dentists and made their money on a different business model and were big on selling dentures. Dentistry got medicalised [?] along with medicine - becoming a lobby that increasingly regulated outliers and competitors, esp dental tech.

All of the anecdotes above land in the historical sweet spot where:

  • crap diet exacerbates dental problems and the fear of life-long tooth aches unless you do something NOW!
  • vulcanite makes dentures an affordable option
  • dentists not sufficiently numerous or powerful as a lobby to enforce different approaches to dental health
  • lack of national health schemes requires people to make long-term planning decisions based on poor knowledge of the future, and balancing financial and physical pain [see documentary here]
23

Thank you everyone for your answers so far. It has taken me a while to respond, but I would like to address a further dimension to this question that I have heard about, and that I alluded to in my first post. I repeat my original trigger warning - this topic deals with some pretty nasty stuff connected with tooth extraction.

What I would like to ask about is - is there any evidence that full tooth extraction was once commonly practiced, perhaps by force, in institutions (prisons, the military, etc)?

In the 1974 horror / musical / comedy movie “The Phantom of the Paradise”, the first step in turning the originally innocuous protagonist into a monster is sending him to jail for life on the basis of planted drug evidence; when in jail, he and other inmates are forced to “volunteer” for an experimental program where their teeth are extracted and replaced by sharp metal ones, on the premise that teeth are a source of health or hygiene problems. Granted, this movie is a campy horror comedy, but according to what I read, the inspiration for this was taken from some cynical novel or short story about some guy who gradually loses multiple body parts, including ending up in jail at one point, where his teeth are extracted on the basis of that very philosophy of teeth being considered a source of health problems. Are any cases known in real life of prison inmates having tooth extractions forced on them, and for that matter, are any cases known of inmates being forced to be guinea pigs for medical tests / experiments (I mean in the free world, not in places like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union).

I will give an example to partially answer my own question - and this is just about the nastiest real-life story on this topic that I have come across. I remember reading that a man who as a boy had ended up in a borstal (a kind of juvenile detention center / reformatory), IIRC in Northern Ireland, reported that he had once been put on a bus with a group of other inmates. Allegedly, they were driven to some place where a group of waiting dental students extracted all their teeth without anaesthetic. No more context than this was given other than that I think the article was about abuse of young people in penal institutions (I unfortunately don’t remember the source).

What about the military? I have seen multiple references in fiction (typically in pieces about World War II or the Cold War) about British and American military dentists supposedly preferring to pull teeth to repairing them. I even recall a middle-aged man I knew who had once served in the US Army claiming to me that Army dentists liked to pull teeth (he would have been in the Army in, I don’t know, perhaps in the 80s or 90s? I’m not sure.) My research suggests that they did also repair teeth, but that for example, a lot of dentures were made in the British Army in World War II, not only for soldiers whose teeth were extracted while deployed, but for those who already had dentures and lost them when they fell out and into the mud (or threw them out as they found them uncomfortable or what have you).

Was a tooth extraction something a military dentist could force on you? One of the “young people with dentures” stories that I found online was someone’s anecdote maybe about their brother. As I recall, he served in the US Navy around the time of World War II. He was sent to the dentist and put under general anesthetic. When he woke up, he found that all his teeth had been extracted, and was told that they had been in very bad condition. Was this actually legal? Could the sailor in question have had the dentist charged with a crime and / or sued the Navy?

24

I don’t know about inmates “forced” to be volunteers for experiments, but I do know that when any psychologist wants to study violent behavior they turn to inmate populations for subjects. I doubt anyone is forced, but some may be enticed by compensation. It probably isn’t much, but $5 for an hour session is more than what prisons generally pay inmates who work in the prison. Not to mention, anything that is different from the sameness of prison life is often welcome.

As far as the army forcing people to have teeth extracted, I don’t have a lot of information on the services historically, but I do know that when I enlisted in the early 90s, there were a lot of specifics of things you could not be missing on your body in order to enlist. Men could be missing one testicle, but not both. There were specific rules about how many fingers you could be missing.

There was also a rule for teeth. I think that the rule then was no more than 5 missing, and if you were missing front teeth, it may have been even fewer. I don’t remember exactly.

So the dentists in the military would try to repair teeth, not extract them. They wouldn’t want to lose trained soldiers because they were missing too many teeth and could no longer pass a physical.

Granted, the rules for enlisting have always been stricter than the rules for staying in, and people with good records can often get waivers, but I also know that a few people in my AIT unit who were in the reserves made a point of getting some pretty extensive dental work done while they were still full-time, and it was free. One guy had not had dental insurance at his previous job, and knew he needed a lot of work, got 3 or 4 teeth filled in one appointment, as well as a chip repaired. Another guy got a root canal.

Nonetheless, it would not surprise me if back in the days when pulling a tooth was standard treatment for a cavity, soldiers had teeth pulled that looked bad, but may not have been bothering them, and they were not given a choice in the matter. The idea would be that someone getting shipped someplace where he might be far from a dentist ought to get it done before it was a problem.

There are lots of things you don’t get choices about once you have enlisted.

25

When my boss joined the navy in the late 1970’s, he and all the others were made to have their wisdom teeth removed, whether it was needed or not. The thinking was to avoid problems if anyone had issues crop up while on duty far away. Of course at that time it was common to have your wisdom teeth removed “just in case”.

26

It’s still pretty common.

FWIW, when we were told we couldn’t be missing more than 5 teeth, that didn’t count wisdom teeth. You had “all” you teeth even if you didn’t have wisdom teeth. I know for sure, because mine were removed, and I had all my teeth according to my records.

FTR, mine were surgically removed when I was 17 because they were badly impacted. One was in my jaw sideways, and growing into the roots of the tooth next to it. None had erupted, which is why they had to be done surgically, and I had GA. They don’t want to GA more often than necessary, so I had all 4 done at once.

27

Thank goodness, my top wisdom teeth never came in.

My bottom ones did; my left one had to be removed because I broke it when biting onto an unpopped popcorn kernel. It was a very painful procedure, even with local anaesthetic. I probably should get the other one removed; it has grown in sideways and is probably not good for the tooth beside it, but let’s just say I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Someday, perhaps.