Re: Dee Mills, of Surrey, United Kingdom - Follow Up

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:11:59 -0800, "Skitt" <skitt99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Robin Bignall wrote:

It seems to me that a far greater percentage of American parents
have their children's teeth fitted with braces as a matter of
course than is the case here. I know that neither in England nor
in France did any dentist suggest that my children have braces,
and it's not because their teeth are perfect. In fact,
ruminating about it, I'm not sure I've ever seen a non-American
with braces, except as a medical necessity.

I had braces, back in the very early 'forties, in Latvia. They were rather
simple -- a single wire across the fronts of my teeth, attached to caps on
the end molars. Unfortunately, the wire wore a slight groove in one of my
teeth. My problem was that I had rather prominent fangs. They never really
fell in line, in spite of the braces. No matter.

See: http://www.geocities.com/opus731/skitt15.jpg

The male side of my family has the same problem, caused, so a
French dentist told me after seeing some X-rays of number one
son's teeth back in the 1970s, by extremely stubborn milk teeth.
He extracted the milk teeth before the adult teeth had begun to
go awry: same for number two son a decade and a half later.

Things were different in my case. In my parents' (b. 1899)
generation and class there was a morbid fear of doctors,
hospitals and dentists. It was not unusual for working class
people of that period to lose most or all of their teeth by their
mid-twenties because extraction was the only cure for toothache.
(Such was often the case even as late as the mid-1950s. One of
my first summer jobs as a student was in a cigarette factory
which employed so many people that they found it necessary to
employ a dentist and anaesthetist full-time, just to perform
extractions.)

My two end molars grew outwards over the teeth underneath so
that, at age 17, I greatly resembled Dracula. I had to have them
extracted, and lived with gaps until I started work, because the
standard NHS plastic plate of the late 1950s didn't allow me to
close my mouth properly and I couldn't persuade an NHS dentist to
apply for permission to supply a metal plate just for cosmetic
reasons.
--
Robin
Herts, England
.

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