Catherine Carstairs, The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality

Abstract

Oral health today is in crisis. Globally, access to oral health care is largely dictated by socio-economic status and geographic location creating huge inequalities between those with healthy teeth and those without. While oral health has long been maligned in history, the stark inequalities associated with it are attracting growing scholarly attention. Catherine Carstairs, a historian based at the University of Guelph, has focused on these inequalities in her latest book. Carstairs’ book is both a history of oral health in Canada and a manifesto for tackling current oral health inequalities. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, she outlines how the current provision of oral health services and goods across the Canadian provinces was historically shaped throughout the twentieth century and how this history resulted in the integration of oral hygiene practices into everyday life. While this story is in some ways a global one, Carstairs’ attention to Canada’s particular mix of public and private health care provision helps to situate the book as a nuanced national history and demonstrates the importance of teeth to health, communication, beauty and interpersonal relationships.