Dental health as a neglected issue in medical history: the school dental service in England and Wales, 1900-40.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that, in the first half of the twentieth century, Britain's working-class population had poor dental health. Richard Hoggart, for example, recalled of his childhood in the Hunslet area of Leeds that he and his contemporaries were very aware of "corns, bad eyesight, corrected by cheap spectacles (Woolworths usually), indigestion, flatulence and constipation.... ailments, I suppose, which came from poor diet, insufficient exercise and ill-fitting shoes". This list of minor but persistent sickness also included poor dental health, and many adults wore dentures as they had lost all their teeth. Hoggart remembered that "one was very much aware of false teeth; adults bending over you were likely to present rows of startlingly regular, cheap-looking gnashers", and he recalled that once he sipped from a glass of water on a bedside table and found "Uncle Walter's teeth knocking against my own". I This impression is echoed by the comments of other writers, and by the findings of social surveys. George Orwell argued after his famous expedition to Wigan that malnutrition was reflected in poor dental health, and he recorded the opinion of one woman who had told him that "teeth is just a misery".2 Margery Spring Rice, in her study of the health of 1,250 working-class women published in 1939, found that 165 said they had poor teeth, and 47 of those had not had any advice or treatment.3 Indeed this figure, of 13.2 per cent with poor dental health, was almost certainly an underestimate. Yet while anecdotal evidence suggests that poor dental health was an everyday feature of working-class life, historians who have recently begun to chart the extent and effectiveness of health services before the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) have largely ignored dental health as an aspect of morbidity. Indeed they have concentrated on services for children at the expense of provision for adults. Some historians of education, such as John Hurt, have examined dental services in schools in the