Medicine: New False Teeth

In New York as in many another big city and in many another crowded profession, Jewish dentists once felt that the clique which managed the local subdivisions of the American Dental Association discriminated against them. Eventually they banded together with similarly distressed Jewish dentists in Newark, Passaic, Westchester County and Montreal and formed the Allied Dental Council. This happened 24 years ago. The Council now has 3,000 members, is conservative, and now admits non-Jews who are not antiSemitic.

Last week the Allied Dental Council moved its headquarters from grubby lower Manhattan near Cooper Union to prosperous West 57th Street near Calvary Baptist Church. For the star attraction of their dedication program they invited non-Jewish Dr. Victor Hugo Sears to give them his first formal explanation of a new kind of false teeth.

Dr. Sears, 47, onetime professor of prosthetic dentistry in New York University, took his stance between the rami of a huge artificial jawbone. The over-size was necessary to illustrate his points clearly. These were:

The biting surfaces of natural teeth are irregular. The pressure on them in biting and chewing is therefore irregular. They can stand this because they are firmly fixed in their sockets. A set of false teeth, because they are fixed to removable plates, rock in the jaws and hurt the gums, sometimes the bones.

Dr. Sears prevents that by making his patients chew like cows and sheep. He makes the surface of false bicuspids and molars practically flat, sets the bicuspids and first molars a little higher in their cases than the other false teeth, and a trifle offset. This compels the lower jaw to move straight up and down against the upper jaw, instead of in the natural scissors movement. The extra height of the middle teeth prevents Dr. Sears’s patients from shutting their jaws completely. Only way to do that and to bite into food is to thrust out the lower jaw so that the high teeth clear each other. This enables one to nibble. While this process goes on (practice soon removes the strain), the second molars keep the artificial dentures from springing out of the mouth.