(M)Oral Hygiene: Race, Class, and Paediatric Dentistry in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

Sarah Duff, Colby College

During the 1920s and 1930s, South African child welfare societies and municipal public health departments began to make available dental and oral hygiene services to poor white and, to a lesser extent, black children in urban. Although this was part of a wider set of public health interventions intended to improve the health of, particularly, poor white children, dentistry was linked closely to the eugenic aims of the child welfare movement. As Truby King—the founder of the influential mothercraft movement which operated around the British Empire in the interwar period—argued in his pamphlet The Story of the Teeth and How to Save Them (1917), the proper care of the teeth was the foundation on which the moral character of the child was built. The purpose of this paper is to trace the establishment of a network of dental clinics for poor children—some of them permanent, others ad hoc—around South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. The paper then turns to an analysis of the ways in which dental care was seen an important means of constructing ‘civilised’ white subjects. The paper argues that as a result of this, the provision of oral hygiene and dental care to black children of a similar class was a considerably less effective. In so doing, the paper suggests that the study of the history of dentistry demonstrates that ‘wellbeing’ was, frequently, constituted not only of physical good health (and, importantly, lack of pain), but also of moral rectitude: and that these two concepts were co-constituted. This is the first attempt not only to trace part of the early history of dentistry as a public health intervention in South Africa, but also to position this history in relation to a set of debates about the construction of racialised childhoods.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 27. Oral Health and Hygiene