Shangas
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 6,116
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
...is that friend still alive?
While en-masse preventative extraction at 21 was never a popular or common thing in the US, it was considered a fact of life here that most people would lose at least some of their natural teeth by their thirties -- and it was quite rare for someone over fifty to have all, or even most, of their natural teeth: flouridated drinking water didn't become common until the sixties and seventies, which made a major difference in the prevalence of tooth decay.
One doesn't think of dentists as colorful characters, but the Era had E. L. "Painless" Parker, a flamboyant huckster who franchised an entire chain of associated dental clinics using his "painless" method of extractions. "Painless" traveled the country giving lectures on his system, illustrating them with a large pail of extracted teeth:
"Next!"
I remember using these in the early seventies. We threw them like a Frisbee when the teacher left the classroom.Another thing we did in science class was put little square asbestos-covered mesh pads on a tripod on top of our bunsen burners to hold the beakers.