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
IndexAbout the Author
Summary
Why are Americans so uniquely obsessed with teeth? Perfect white, straight teeth. Making the American Mouth is at once a history of U.S. 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 addresses the ways dentists worked to expand that accessand improve the public image of their profession. Comprehensive in scope, Making the American Mouth describes how dentists' early public health commitments withered under the strain of fights over fluoride, midcentury social movements fo
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-216) and index
