A TOOTHLESS AGE.

Hokitika Guardian, 26 May 1923, Page 2

A TOOTHLESS AGE.

POSSIBILITY OF FUTURE. EFFORTS TO PREVENT IT. Science is now waging a great battle to prevent us becoming a toothless nation. It will be a long war, much more arduous and requiring more patience than the Great War, but the leaders directing the fight are men who have keen up against propositions quite as tough. Everyone who has a child at the public elementary schools is aware of this national effort to improve the dental condition of the race, says a London paper.

Figures sent in by the local education authorities showed nearly 70 per cent, of children were in need of treatment, and this percentage was in inspect of more than two and a half million children.

Professor Sir Arthur Keith, the eminent anatomist, points out that if we go on living our present highly artificial life we shall become a nation of more or less toothless people, in the sense that our teeth will not only he of little use, hut a real source of danger.

Something is very wrong, and it is to increase our knowledge of the causes of dental diseaso that the Alcdical Research Council appointed a committee of exports who .are now working in tlie laboratories at untiring experiments. At the head of this committee is Professor W. D. Halliburton, and under his chairmanship are eight distinguished scientists, including one lady. Airs Edward Alellanhy. One of the first investigations upon which the experts have been engaged is the structure of our teeth. The enamel that hard, coating which can be burnished with care, has always been a puzzle. Under the miseroseopo this is seen to he built of prisms. Tests have been applied to the teotli, not only of men, hut of apes and fishes to find out how these prisms are formed and exactly how they grow. Thousands of years before men were civilised there was one man who had an extremely imperfect tooth, though it looked sound. It was a double tooth found in tlie skull of a man buried in ■Neolithic times (about 2000 years liefore Christ), and Air F. Howard Mummery, tlie dental investigator, who lias been examining the teeth of ' ancient men, found in this .specimen more numerous imperfections than in any apparently sound modern teeth he had examined.

Tho enamel, for example, was practically split down the centre, and the defects were not found until put under the microscope AA’nlkofl, another investigator, found that there was hardly a tooth of civilised man, which did not show some defect. But, although Air Alummery found these delects, the teeth of this ancient man showed no sign of decay. So it would seem that the ancient Briton, save in exceptional circumstances, did not suffer from toothache. It has been established that “on the whole badly formed teeth are more suseeptiole” to disease. If we cannot stop this changing shape, with its jumbleil-up molar system, what then? Are we doomed to a toothless age, or will science master the situation in time?