History
Hereâs How The Army Realized The Importance Of Teeth
A brief history of the incorporation of dentistry in the army
It was the early-twentieth century and Britain had started recruiting soldiers for the First World War.
Mr. Bickham, a Boer war veteran, wanted to pick up a gun and shoot some bullets once again. But he didnât seem very happy once he visited the recruitment office.
âThey must want blokes to bite the damned Germans.â
â Mr. Bickham, a Boer war veteran who was bluntly rejected by the recruiting officers
Regret is the strictest teacher. It taught the British the value of good teeth during the Boer War. About 6,942 men were admitted for dental issues and about a third of them were invalided from the service. Thus, poor dental health became synonymous with rejection in the recruitment offices of World War I. As the adage goes, âAn army that cannot bite, cannot fightâ
Not that the military world over had always been ignorant of the enameled sprockets behind the lips. In fact, in the 17th century, army surgeons had instruments for scaling and tooth extraction in addition to their regular bullet extractors and amputation saws.
The soldiers had to use their incisors to bite open the grenade fuse before lighting it and musketeers would deploy them to pull off the wooden caps of powder cartridges before they could pour the charge into the musket. The importance of incisors could be deduced from the fact that removing them from a man of military age was an offense.
But as the mid-nineteenth century saw the invention of repeating rifles (able to fire quite a few bullets between each reload) and newer versions of grenades, the significance of good teeth became less conspicuous.
Although, the Boer War balanced it out. Many cases of âAcute Necrotizing Ulcerative Gingivitisâ aka Trench Mouth, surfaced in the front lines. The gums would bleed and ulcerate rendering the soldiers incapable of consuming their ration. And a soldier who couldnât eat, couldnât fight.
Coming back to World War I, the army was wary of dental problems but not at the scale that would imply the formation of a separate dedicated dental corps. The general surgeons were expected to handle the dental cases too. As a result, no dentist was part of the British Expeditionary Force deployed in France in 1914.
âCan a medical man say just exactly from the necessarily hurried examination he must give of the mouth, and without a special dental knowledge, what constitutes a good dentition?â
â Henry Percy, a British-born dental surgeon
The condition was miserable and the habits even worse. A quick poll conducted by an officer revealed that a huge number of men had never used a toothbrush in their lives.
But all of this didnât bother the superiors much. That is until General Douglas Haig himself developed a toothache at the peak of the Battle of Aisne in October 1914.
A civil dentist Auguste Charles Valadier was summoned and asked to extract the tooth under a torrent of bullets raining above.
Finally, more dentists were summoned to assist the health care facilities in the front lines but it was only after the end of the war that a dedicated Army Dental Corps was established in 1921.
Valadier was an enthusiastic dental surgeon whose work extended into the realm of facial reconstruction. He was instrumental in inspiring Harold Gillies, an ENT surgeon, who founded the field of plastic surgery by practicing upon thousands of soldiers with shattered jaws and blown-off faces.
It was the first time that the doctors focused not only on bringing back the functionality but also on the aesthetics of the face. Something that is invariably important when it comes to getting accepted by the society.
The Unknown Doctor
Sources:
- âThe Facemakerâ by Lindsey Fitzharris
- Canât bite, cant fight
