The teeth of ten Sioux Indians / by Wilberforce Smith.

  • Smith, Wilberforce.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The teeth of ten Sioux Indians / by Wilberforce Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The Teeth of Ten Sioux Indians. By Dr. Wilberforce Smith. \ [plates xir, xv.] The teeth of savages in general have characteristics which are well known to scientific osteologists. (Fig. 1.) They resemble precisely those found in skulls of ancient men, not necessarily savages, and are greatly superior to the teetli of modern civilised races, alike in development and in freedom from decay. The object of the present communication is to give numerical record to this superiority as found in some living savages, viz., in the Sioux Indians who lately visited London. It was obtained with some difficulty in ten consecutive cases. The form of the record has been determined by the fact that it was undertaken as a fragment of a larger investigation. The latter has a hygienic purpose hardly within the scope of the Anthropological Institute, but it may be briefly mentioned for the purpose of elucidation. An attempt lias been made during some years past, to obtain adequate statistics of the average amount of decay of teeth in our own country, that decay being in amount very large and as some think very disastrous. Several years before learning that Dr. Cunningham of Cambridge and others were engaged in kindred work, I had set myself the task of counting teeth, exclusively from the physician’s point of view, viz., as pairs of grinding teeth duly opposed and available for mastication. According to this method, I have counted exclu- sively molars and premolars; and these, not as individual teeth, but only as they form opponent pairs. Single teeth without opponents have been left out of account. To illustrate non- opposition of teeth, I here show a model taken by a dental friend, from the mouth of a member of my own household, 51 years of age. It shows seven good grinding teeth, molars and premolars, but the missing teeth have been lost in a manner so unfortunate for the owner’s mastication, that there remains only a fraction of one grinding pair, calculable as a third of a pair. (Comp, also Fig. 2.)