Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1892 — The Modern Tooth. [ARTICLE]

The Modern Tooth.

Fresh from' his recent revelation as to the inevitable results of higher education on the woman of the future, Sir James Crichton Brown, who presided over a meeting of the British Association, ha 9 felt it is painful duty to call attention to the lamentable condition of' the tooth of the present. The picture he draws is truly desolating, and it is all the more so in that it is founded on the relentless basis of actual investigation. Out of 1,861 children under twelve recently examined the proportion of those blest with normal or perfect teeth in need of neither extraction nor filling was only one in eighteen. Even more alarming are the dental statistics of Leeds, where the teeth of 90 percent of the population are bad. Furthermore Sir James stated that no fewer than 10,000,000 of artifical teeth are used ia England annually. Of the three causes to which Sir James Crichton Brown attributed the present parlous condition of the human tooth —soft food, high pressure and vitiated atmosphere—the first, at least, is by no means an inevitable condition of latter-day life. On the other hand the nervous tension of modern existence and the growth of large towns are factors which cannot be eliminated from the great dental problem, and are bound to exert an increasingly destructive influence on the type of the coming man. We are rapidly tending toward an era of total baldness, and this, it seems, is to be further aggravated by toothlessness. There is an ancient Greek legend of the daughters ■of Phorcys, who had only one eye and one tooth among them. This, we take it, must have been a prophetic view of the results of culture and civilization on the woman of the future.—[London Globe.